January 2012
2 posts
1 tag
How Arabs Entered a 'Post-Islamist' Age -- By...
London
A year ago this week, as he watched the great uprisings in Tunis and Cairo, the French scholar Olivier Roy declared that they marked the end of Islamist politics. “If you look at the people who launched these revolts,” he wrote, “it is clear that they represent a post-Islamist generation. … The new revolutionaries are perhaps practising or even devout Muslims, but...
1 tag
How Canada Went Straight to Kandahar
What on earth were we doing in Kandahar? Now that it’s all over, that question hangs in the air. Decades hence, students will be stumped by that question in much the same way I was when my high-school textbook opened to Canada’s place in the Boer War. It was full of sound and fury, but signifying exactly what? How did we pour five years, more than $18-billion and 158 lives into something so large...
December 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Hope & Peril in Europe's Landing Pads: The Euro...
Antwerp
It is an early Saturday evening on Handelstraat, a busy and somewhat dishevelled boulevard in the north of this historic Belgian port city, its sidewalks lined with outdoor cafés and tea shops, fish restaurants, butchers and bakeries, all of them buzzing with customers. It’s a typical European street scene, except that most of the people have olive-coloured skin, many women sport...
1 tag
The Inevitable Economics of Tahrir Square
Cairo on Friday was a tableau of bloodied faces, firebombs and rocks, club-swinging soldiers and turbulent street battles. If this year began with a simple arithmetic of immovable protesters facing down a dictatorship, it is ending with a more complicated geometry involving a power-wielding army, resurgent Islamists and humiliated protesters.
How do we understand the new politics of the Arab...
1 tag
The Night David Cameron Failed
London
Forget economics. This was a political moment, and it will be remembered, possibly for a very long time, as the moment the politicians failed.
Angela Merkel failed: The German Chancellor could have used her country’s nearly unanimous clout to confront the root causes of the euro crisis, which lie in inequalities of trade and a collapse in consumption, but instead chose to pretend it was a...
1 tag
Three Misconceptions about Peacekeeping and...
This is a presentation about peacekeeping operations (PKO) and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) made by Roland Paris of the University of Ottawa during the 40th annual Canada-UK Colloquium at Wilton Park, England. It is referenced in my column on the challenges of humanitarian war.
Three Misconceptions About Peacekeeping and Intervention// < ![CDATA[
(function() { var scribd =...
1 tag
At a Moment Without War, Time To Consider Our...
Wiston House, England
Ten years and seven weeks ago, this paper’s front-page headline read, in banner letters, “Canadians head off to war.” That would become the longest, and possibly the most controversial, military combat operation in Canadian history. On Thursday, with the lowering of the Maple Leaf flag at Kandahar Air Force base, it effectively came to an end: For the first time in more than...
November 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Irony
A member of Iran’s Basij plays the René Magritte card at the British embassy, Tehran, November 29, 2011.
Original Article
1 tag
Two Paths in the World, One Straight and One...
London
William Hague is a conservative foreign minister. He is an ardent supporter of Israel and a devoted promoter of Britain’s economic interests in the world, especially its petroleum industry.
How does he put those principles into practice? By taking an oblique approach. He has led the way in denouncing Israel for its expansion of illegal settlements beyond the country’s legal pre-1967...
1 tag
A Blue Tide Washes Over Europe
On Sunday, Nov. 20, after Spain’s national-election votes were counted, the last major patch of red disappeared from the European map. For the first time in modern history every major capital in the continent, from Lisbon to Helsinki, is now home to a conservative government.
Spain’s national election has been fought at the peak of a monetary crisis that has already tossed Greek prime minister...
1 tag
This is Where the Euro Crisis Becomes a Political...
We have now entered a very dangerous place, here in Europe, where the economic and monetary crisis is triggering a widespread crisis of politics and citizenship. Until this week, the debt emergency had brought everyone closer together. Now it will drive the continent apart.
It is easy to confuse the euro zone, the 17-country bloc that has shared the euro as its currency since 1999, with the...
October 2011
10 posts
1 tag
Baby Seven Billion? Not So Fast
London
Many of us awoke this morning to learn that the world’s seven billionth citizen had supposedly been born. Or, rather, three seven-billionth babies: Because of competition among UN agencies and charities to mark this world-population milestone, we wound up with a Baby Seven Billion in the Philippines, another in India and a third in Russia.
As if the world’s odometer had turned over and...
1 tag
Save The World, Inc.: The Revolution of...
PORT-AU-PRINCE: Redrawing the map
If you had visited the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince a few years ago, you would have found the mountainside suburbs to its west, where the grand old homes are located, scattered with a few handsome compounds housing the great institutions that had dominated philanthropy since shortly after the Second World War.
At the hilltop was the enclosure of CARE...
1 tag
Libya's Uniqueness May Prove Its Salvation -- Or...
The demise of Moammar Gadhafi is a great moment for Libyans, who are ending two generations of shame and degradation. And it’s a small milestone for the world, as it will reduce the number of non-democratic states from 55 to 54.
Beyond that, we shouldn’t pretend it has any larger world significance. Libya is unique. It’s a wealthy oil state with a tiny, ethnically homogeneous population; its...
1 tag
Gaddafi Was a Rolling Stone, and All He Ultimately...
Before he retreated to his home village, then to a compound and then into a drainage pipe with a golden pistol in hand for his final standoff, Moammar Gadhafi made it abundantly clear in one of his final marathon rants that he and his sons would not flee or surrender.
“We only have one choice. This is our country and we shall stay here till the end – dead, alive, victorious. It doesn’t matter,”...
7 tags
Why has Poland's Democracy Flourished While Its...
It was barely noticed on Monday morning as the world reeled from the violence in Egypt and Syria and the turn toward authoritarianism in Russia, but Poland’s national election showed how a formerly authoritarian country can defy the odds and step peacefully into democratic and economic stability.
It’s worth studying the Polish situation, as it raises some important questions about why some...
8 tags
As Putin Sets Back Democracy's Clock, Russia...
As if to provide a useful metaphor for Russian politics, Vladimir Putin recently emerged from the Black Sea, in a scuba suit, carrying two ancient Greek vases. “The boys and I found them,” the vacationing Prime Minister, and former President, said of these treasures from the birthplace of democracy.
On Thursday, his spokesman admitted what everyone already knew: They were planted. “Look, Putin...
10 tags
How David Cameron's Conservatives Fell Apart Over...
London
Margaret Thatcher was too frail to attend her Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester this week, which may be just as well, as the conference has turned into an angry attack on her beloved concept of individual rights. After all, she spent her Prime Ministership in the 1980s rebuilding her party — and Britain — around the rights of the individual, and famously...
9 tags
Amanda Knox & Dominique Strauss Kahn Reveal A...
When Amanda Knox, appealing her conviction for the November 5, 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, stood up in a fourteenth-century courtroom on Monday morning to make a final, successful plea to have her conviction overturned, her sobbing entreaty was also a veiled attack on a system of justice:
“I trusted them completely,” she said of the Italian police and legal system. “I was betrayed on the...
11 tags
Drinking Poison To Survive: The Week Europe's...
As the euro crisis approached a terminal point with the approaching default of Greece, the 17 countries that have the euro as their currency were forced to wrestle with something they should have considered months if not years before: A coordinated, central and lasting intervention into the continent’s financial systems. This turned the monetary crisis into a set of political crises. Here, I...
8 tags
Violence, Obsolete: This is What an Age of Peace...
London
Are we living through the least violent moment in human history? Has there ever been an age, during the past 10,000 years, with fewer wars or mass killings or chances of being murdered?
The answer seems, to me, almost self-evident. There are terrible wars today, but they are extremely scarce, not very intense and do not affect the lives of many people. If we assume that Afghanistan, Iraq,...
September 2011
8 posts
13 tags
Will a Robin Hood Tax Make or Break Europe?
It’s official: among the weapons Europe will try to deploy in its last-ditch effort to save its currency will be a “Robin Hood tax,” a miniscule fee on stock-market trades and other financial transactions.
That, at least, is was what José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, proposed in his “state of the union” speech to the European parliament on Wednesday morning. He was...
7 tags
Spain's Windmill of Political Action Comes to a...
When Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero went to bed on Sunday, he may well have picked up his Cervantes and turned to its climactic passage. It occurs when Don Quixote realizes that his bold efforts at heroism have not transformed Spain or caused anyone to love him, but have produced only heartbreak:
“The fact is,” he says to his squire Sancho, “that I was born to be an example...
8 tags
Statehood Before Talks: For Palestine as for...
New York
The Middle East crisis returned this week to its place of birth in New York City. The United Nations statehood resolution by the Palestinians is dangerous, impractical and possibly the only way to create a secure life for Israel and its neighbours.
Using a UN General Assembly resolution to make an end run around potential negotiations and create a Palestinian state is not a new idea, of...
9 tags
Recep Erdogan, Superstar: The Turkish PM's Arab...
From the moment he stepped off his jet in Cairo Tuesday night to find thousands of Egyptian fans shouting “God is great,” this was far more than a routine visit by a foreign leader.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, toured the newly liberated capitals of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya this week with the sort of popularity usually reserved for pop stars. He is polling as the most popular...
12 tags
Three Views of a Riot: How Britain Discovered its...
London
In the month since my city exploded in flames and mob violence, much has been swept clean. The burned-out blocks in Tottenham, Croydon and Clapham have been boarded up, the glaziers have repaired thousands of smashed shop windows and the courts have tried 1,715 looters, most of them young and male.
The violence is done, for now. But what’s opened up is a rupture in the ruling classes over...
5 tags
Belgium Without Government: Not Quite A...
Antwerp
To look around the elegant city of Antwerp, you wouldn’t know that Belgium has now gone longer without a government than any country in modern history.
The trains still run on time, the teachers show up in their classrooms, museums are packed, taxes are collected, welfare is paid, and the country’s F-16 fighter jets are dropping bombs in Libya - - even though Belgium has now gone a year...
7 tags
At the Brink of Disaster, Germany Retreats From...
London
As Greece teeters on the edge of insolvency this week, worries about Europe’s ability to hold its currency union together have shifted from a debt-crippled Greek economy to a German government that appears to be withdrawing from its economic responsibilities.
News on Monday that Greece is within weeks of running out of cash, and that Berlin is increasingly willing to allow Athens to fail,...
6 tags
From the Twin Towers to Tahrir Square: The Jihad...
Like most people, Mohammed Abdel Rahman remembers exactly where he was when the Twin Towers fell. He was in Afghanistan, holding a rifle, among the men who ordered and backed the Sept. 11 attacks. While he says he didn’t cheer that day, people around him were rejoicing.
The bearded Egyptian, who was later captured and tortured by U.S. forces, was a pioneering member of the al-Qaeda generation –...
August 2011
3 posts
5 tags
Meet Mohammed Busidra, Libya's Post-Gaddafi...
Benghazi
For more than 20 years, he was Moammar Gadhafi’s most notorious political prisoner – the Islamist ringleader who escaped the 1996 one-day massacre of 1,200 of his fellow inmates and survived a decade in solitary confinement.
Today, as Col. Gadhafi’s rebel opponents falter in the rebel capital of Benghazi, Mohammed Busidra has quietly turned himself into the post-Gadhafi kingmaker.
Read...
5 tags
London's Riots: Not Race, Not Politics, But an...
London
As the sun set Monday, the thick plumes of smoke rose across the London skyline, from the northeast and south, for the third night running. For the first time in three decades, London is burning.
The small crowds of very young men and women, of every skin colour, typically dressed in almost identical hooded sweatshirts, were on the main streets of the mainly poor neighbourhoods along the...
14 tags
In Norway, Echoes of 9/11 as Europe Struggles With...
London
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a debate erupted in Western countries over how to approach the more moderate but influential voices of Islamic fundamentalism: Outlawing them, tolerating them or engaging them in dialogue.
Now, in the wake of the July 22 attacks in Norway, a similar discussion has broken out in Europe over how to handle a potentially threatening group with a...
July 2011
8 posts
7 tags
How Xenophobic Extremism Crept Into Northern...
Oslo
One Monday in February, the Oslo media were ushered to the headquarters of an agency known as the Police Security Service for a surprising announcement. Intelligence agents had concluded that the most serious threat to Norway’s security had become the combination of extreme right-wing international organizations and “Norwegian anti-Islamists.”
“The combination of Russian neo-Nazis –...
10 tags
The Popular Fiction Behind Norway's Terrorism
Oslo
Every act of terrorism is built on a foundation of widely repeated ideas. To convert an ordinary person into a believer who’s willing to commit murder, those ideas must warn of an urgent threat of devastating proportions, one whose resistance and exposure will turn the terrorist into a hero and martyr. They must be repeated so often that they can be perceived as a crystalline truth that will...
10 tags
The "Eurabia" Movement Struggles to Distance...
Oslo
As self-confessed Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik waits behind bars for a late-September trial for at least 76 killings he committed, attention has turned to the circle of anti-immigrant writers, bloggers and political figures whose ideas he cited as motivations for his atrocities.
As they learned that their ideas had formed the ideological basis for one of the deadliest acts of...
5 tags
Norway's Breivik: The Terrorist Wing of Europe's...
Oslo
Norwegians, reeling at the death of at least 93 adults and children in Friday’s mass shootings and bombing attack, are being forced to confront the fact that the perpetrator is not a lone madman, but a highly organized Norwegian political terrorist who claims to be part of a Europe-wide movement opposed to Muslim immigrants and multiculturalism.
The confessed killer, 32-year-old Anders...
7 tags
From Oslo Bombing Site, a Hole in the Norwegian...
I deliver a video talk from the heart of Oslo’s July 22 terrorist atrocities.
View video at The Globe and Mail
Original Article
11 tags
How Britain Saved Itself From Corruption, With a...
London
I was greeted with incredulous stares when I told my Libyan hosts this week that I’d make a 17-hour drive across the Sahara followed by a six-hour flight from Cairo to London in order to watch an uprising against a government that had become intertwined with a corrupt police force and a power-seeking media.
The folks in Benghazi were hardly alone in raising an eyebrow. From the beginning,...
1 tag
The Political Thinking of Anders Behring Breivik
These are the collected writings of Anders Behring Breivik, accused of killing more than 84 young people at a Labour Party gathering in Norway and at least seven in a car bombing in Oslo. These are comments he posted on the right-wing site document.no Thanks to my Norwegian friends for translating this.
Anders Breivik From Document No// < ![CDATA[
(function() { var scribd =...
6 tags
Freed from Gadhafi, Some Libyans in East Now Begin...
Benghazi
One of the few really steady jobs in liberated eastern Libya these days is that of caricaturist, and guys such as Adil Mansur are cleaning up. The 30-year-old history student has drawn posters of dictator Moammar Gadhafi as a dog, a snake and a hanging victim. Today he is producing a large image of rebel interim-government leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil as a mellow and saintly figure.
...
October 2010
1 post
1 tag
How Marriage Became the World's Most Destructive...
I met 16-year-old Archana Kelkar in a nice middle-class high-rise apartment, full of art and home-entertainment equipment and musical instruments, in northern Mumbai. At first, I did not notice her. As I spoke to the couple who lived there about their work in the film industry, Archana swept the floor and served us tea, and, at my request, they introduced me to her.
Read column in The Globe and...
September 2010
1 post
8 tags
Parsing the Papal Visit
London
As international controversies go, the launch of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain yesterday seemed staid and uneventful: A relatively pomp-free descent from a commercial jetliner into surprisingly uncrowded streets of Edinburgh; a series of short speeches with the Queen, Scottish separatist premier Alex Salmond and numerous church dignitaries, and a quiet mass in Glasgow.
But...
May 2010
1 post
5 tags
Dusting Off Canada's Afghanistan Manual
There have been few Canadian government documents as eloquent or fascinating as the 249-page bound volume known as B-GL-323-004/FP-003. Just over a year old, it is already classic of intelligent research and philosophical probity. Better known under the bland title “Counter-insurgency operations;” it is, in every important respect, Canada’s military manual and operational manifesto for the...
February 2010
1 post
7 tags
Let's Refocus: Kashmir, Not Kabul; Kash-Pak, not...
Read original article in The Globe and Mail
Acting like an especially convivial nightclub manager, Pervez Musharraf storms the room and opens with a joke: “You should come to Pakistan – it’s the most happening place in the world, where there’s never a dull moment!”
There is nervous laughter. The man who was the military ruler of Pakistan for seven years would like to get back into...
October 2009
2 posts
1 tag
How Anti-Communism Led Eastern Europe in Two...
Prague
Twenty years ago this week, two young men found themselves standing in a crowd here in Prague’s Wenceslas Square, chanting, jumping up and down to music and demanding an end to one of history’s more cartoonishly heavy-handed dictatorships.
Read original column in The Globe and Mail
Dan Drapal and Frantisek Kostlan were both manual labourers with decent educations, trapped in...
1 tag
A Revolution Faster Than Twitter in Czechosolvakia...
Prague
In 1989, Jirka Meska was in the business of making information move, as fast as possible, around the communist state of Czechoslovakia.
Read original article in The Globe and Mail
Officially, that meant he was among the country’s highly protected elite software engineers, responsible for writing operating systems and networking applications for the primitive mainframes of the...
September 2008
1 post
5 tags
Debunking the 'Eurabia' Myth
London
There is Europe and there is “Europe,” the fantasy kingdom wished into being by North American ideologues to turn their silly ideas into action movies.
Once upon a time, this pretend continent was the left’s dollhouse, a land where high government spending supposedly led to all manner of social good – so long as you avoided noting that Germany has fewer child-care spaces than the...
July 2007
1 post
8 tags
India and Pakistan Should Blame Gandhi, Churchill...
Mumbai
Sixty years ago this week, a bespectacled British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe arrived in India for the first time in his life to take on a simple three-week job. His solitary task, finished on Aug. 13, 1947, would have a few immediate results - hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, millions mutilated or raped and tens of millions forced out of their homes and livelihoods.
In a...
May 2007
2 posts
1 tag
My Interview With Jafar Panahi
Tehran
The filmmaker Jafar Panahi is now sentenced to six years of imprisonment in Tehran, accused of “working against the Iranian system.” I sat down with Mr. Panahi at his Tehran apartment and discussed his defiant approach to filmmaking and censorship.
See also my feature The Tragic Paradox of the Iranian Director: Three Interviews
Doug Saunders: Has censorship been a constant...
1 tag
The Awkward Saint: An Afternoon With Václav Havel
Prague
You won’t find him in the castle these days. You have to walk a few blocks, to a handsome if unremarkable Gothic building on a busy commercial street, and look for the big airy office between the radio station and law firm.
This is modern, post-communist Prague, jammed with traffic, emblazoned with promises of quick money, polluted with French supermarkets and British drunks,...