A German interior ministry proposal to grant Iraqi Christians asylum in Germany as a persecuted minority drew criticism last week from the chair of the Bundestag’s Human Rights Committee, who insisted that the program should be open to other Iraqis as well. “We should also accept Christians, because they are under particular pressure,” Herta Däubler-Gmelin said in remarks reported in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “but not only Christians.” “An appropriately large number of Iraqis should be taken in,” she added, “commensurate to Germany’s capacity and economic power.” Herta Däubler-Gmelin? If the name sounds familiar, that is because this is the [...]
The U.S. military’s decision last week to release Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press photographer who has been held by U.S. military forces since April 2006 on accusations of links to terrorism, was not just a blow to the U.S. military’s case against one prisoner. The announcement by the U.S. military, which followed the rulings of an Iraqi judicial panel granting Hussein amnesty, also raised a question war proponents may not want to answer. Namely, if the sovereign institutions and political processes that the U.S. troop surge was supposed to help foster actually take hold, will the United States respect them? [...]
Energy independence has emerged as a popular rallying cry in this U.S. election year. Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls all at some stage have advocated energy independence, which they define as freeing the American oil consumer from the tyranny of importing petroleum from foreign countries, especially the Middle East. While convenient to advocate in an age of sound bite politics, energy independence is in fact not possible to secure in the United States in the foreseeable future, and is of doubtful utility in any country that might be in a position to achieve it. A combination of rising oil prices [...]
