Nothing has been signed yet, but Kommersant is reporting that Cyprus President Dmitris Christofias will be shopping for Russian anti-missile systems, along with some tanks and helicopters, during his upcoming visit to Moscow. I’m not sure what to make of this. Should Russia agree, it seems like a pretty provocative gesture towards Turkey, which was already a bit rattled by the Georgia War. Russia is one of Turkey’s major trading partners, and Christofias was elected on a platform of Cypriot reconciliation. So it would seem that closer integration — as long as it weren’t of the military hardware variety — [...]
Don’t miss Laura Rozen’s MoJo feature on the shadow world of foreign policy: This is a story of the other world, the one whose real power playersnever show up in the CNN headline crawl. It’s the story of a man with ahabit of popping up, Zelig-like, at the nexus of foreign policy and thekinds of businesses that thrive in times of war — security contracting,infrastructure development and postwar reconstruction, influence andintelligence brokering. Besides being a great read, it shows both the extent to which “official” diplomacy is just the tip of the iceberg, but also how what goes on beneath [...]
I pass this on with the caveat that I have no idea how credible it is, but the Iraq Oil Report site is claiming to have a text of the SOFA agreement signed in Baghdad over the weekend. The text is available here as a Word document. If this is, in fact, the actual document, most of the leaks regarding the military aspects seem to have been accurate. The clause forbidding the U.S. from using Iraqi territory to launch an attack on foreign powers is there (Art. 27, sec. 3), and the Iraqis seem to have gotten what they wanted [...]
