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SARKO ON THE RECORD — Eat your heart out, President Bush. Around 600 media types from 40 countries attended French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s press conference last week. That’s more than twice as many as a normal White House presidential press conference. Predictably, the real news was swamped by coverage of what Sarko had to say about his relationship with Italian girlfriend Carla Bruni. But Sarkozy was living up to his campaign promise to change France. He talked of making the three national television channels commercial free, financing them by raising taxes on independent channels and mobile phones, and by taxing […]

As part of the ongoing propaganda battle between the United States and Iran over a Jan. 6 incident in which two alleged Iranian speed boats approached some U.S. Navy ships in the Straits of Hormuz, the U.S. military held a press conference Jan. 13 in Bahrain. The commanders of the two U.S. ships involved in the incident, the U.S.S. Port Royal and U.S.S. Hopper, explained their versions of the incident. Here’s video of that press conference: And here’s the complete Defense Department’s video of the incident (all 45 minutes of it): Meanwhile, on Sunday, a new theory emerged about the […]

Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani joined many commentators earlier this month in making the case for doubling U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan from the current 27,000. He and others argue that more troops would address escalating violence in the country and hedge against the increasing fragility of neighboring Pakistan’s government. Such a large-scale U.S. troop increase, however, could be disastrous in the region, where maintaining a relatively light U.S. footprint and building a more significant allied one is the paradoxical key to defeating al-Qaida and the Taliban. Even the 3,000-man increase that U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is currently considering […]

SADDAM’S MONEY IN FRANCE — AND IN AMERICAN PUBLISHING? — In an article that appeared last month (Dec. 21) in the daily Le Figaro, French journalist George Malbrunot reports that the French government is continuing to resist Iraqi efforts to recover the financial assets of Saddam Hussein in France. According to Malbrunot’s report, some €23.48 million of Saddam’s money remains blocked in French banks. (The original report placed the money in the Banque de France: a claim that has since been denied by the French national bank.) France would thus be in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 of […]

TAYLOR TRIAL RESUMES — At the Hague Jan. 7, prosecutors began presenting their case against former Liberian President Charles Taylor. A Canadian “blood diamond” expert was called as the first of 144 expected witnesses for the prosecution. Taylor faces 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged role trading weapons for diamonds in the brutal 1991-2002 Sierra Leone war. Additionally, the prosecution alleges that the diamond trade through Liberia that earned the Revolutionary United Front — which was responsible for much of the war’s violence — $125 million a year could not have happened without the […]

During the past year, the Implementation Support Unit (ISU), established by the Sixth Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) in December 2006, has provided essential support for international efforts to prevent biological terrorism. Unlike the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the BTWC lacks the large institutional structure to help administer convention-related activities as well as monitor and enforce compliance with its provisions. The three-person ISU, which started work in April 2007 and became fully operational in August 2007, attempts to help fill that gap from its office at the Geneva branch of the […]

A Wednesday report in the German economic daily Handelsblatt makes clear that German-Iranian trade continued to boom in 2007 despite existing U.N. sanctions and international calls to isolate Iran economically. According to statistics cited in a report by Germany’s Federal Trade Agency (BFAI), German exports to Iran are supposed to have declined by 15 percent to around €3.5 billion. However, in what the paper calls a “surprising development,” German imports from Iran actually increased by 50 percent to some €580 million. It should be noted, moreover, that both figures are said to be based on statistical data running only through […]

On closer inspection, the story of Saddam’s Hussein’s financial holdings in France is full of perverse twists and interconnections that cast many aspects of the run-up and aftermath of the Iraq War in a new light. The fact that a front company of the late Iraqi dictator should own a major stake in the publisher of the sneeringly titled “I am America (And So Can You!)” by Stephen Colbert — a comic who made his name, after all, by mocking President Bush and, notably, the latter’s decision to invade Iraq — is only the most glaring of them. As noted […]

Diplomatic tension between Russia and Great Britain that has been building over the past year is likely to continue in 2008. The tension began in May 2007, when Russia refused to extradite Andrei Lugovoy, the main suspect in the murder of Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (the successor to the KGB) and an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko defected to Great Britain in 2000 and became a British citizen. He was poisoned with radioactive polonium at a London restaurant in November 2006 while attempting to investigate the murder of Russian journalist […]

A poignant human and political drama always begins to unfold in American life at this time in the election cycle, when the country turns its attention to choosing a new president and begins to ignore the man in the Oval Office. Americans become mesmerized, electrified, even obsessed with the campaign. All the while, the sitting president still has a long time in his contract as leader of the most powerful country in the world. And yet, the resident of the White House starts looking strangely unimportant, his image begins to fade from the evening news, and even his most passionate […]

Much is at stake when President Bush visits the Middle East this week. The problems of the region have haunted this president, who started his term in office determined to focus on domestic issues, but was quickly forced to devote much of his time and energy to fighting the “war on terror.” With the campaign for the election of the next president already well under way, George W. Bush has to think about his legacy, and he has just one more year in office to shape it. There is little doubt that the Bush presidency will be remembered in future […]

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The voice of fugitive militant leader Shakir al-Abssi arose like a specter from Lebanon’s recent past yesterday. In a voice recording posted on the Internet, the radical leader of the Fatah al-Islam terrorist group threatened further attacks against the nation’s U.S.-backed army. In May, entrenched in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, the Jordanian-born al-Abssi led his Fatah al-Islam militants, which included many non-Palestinians, in a 15-week battle that tested the Lebanese national army and destroyed the refugee camp. Al-Abssi reportedly escaped just hours before Fatah al-Islam’s remaining holdouts were killed or captured in a final breakout […]

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The New Year in Sri Lanka began with an all-out confrontation between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a terrorist group that has been battling the Sri Lankan government on and off for decades. An already fragile ceasefire accord between the two warring parties was irreparably damaged on Jan. 3 when the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa withdrew from the agreement. This in turn rendered the presence of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, an independent body of international investigators observing and recording human rights violations on the island, obsolete. The fact that […]

In her first major comments on relations with Russia, Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s new Prime Minister, last month insisted that she had no intentions of worsening relations with Russia: “I will strive to establish a relationship of equal partnership,” she said. Although Ukraine held its most recent round of legislative elections on Sept. 30, 2007, it was only on Dec. 18, that the so-called “Orange bloc” parties aligned with President Viktor Yushchenko consolidated their narrow victory by securing the appointment of Tymoshenko, currently the country’s most influential and popular politician, as prime minister. Yushchenko had actually appointed Tymoshenko as prime minister […]

One story that appears to have largely fallen through the cracks of international news coverage during the holidays is the mysterious expulsion of two European officials from Afghanistan in late December. The Irishman Michael Semple and the Briton Melvyn Patterson are reported to have left Afghanistan in compliance with the expulsion order shortly after Christmas. Semple has been widely identified as the acting head of the European Union delegation in Afghanistan — although the site of the EU delegation, officially headed by German diplomat Hansjörg Kretschmer, makes no mention of him in this capacity. Patterson is an official of the […]

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Two United Nations peacekeeping soldiers were injured Tuesday by a roadside bomb on a coastal motorway south of Beirut. Company Sgt. Dave Williams and regimental Sgt. Maj. John McCormack, both from Dublin, Ireland, were traveling in a U.N. vehicle when the bomb exploded at 2:50 p.m. local time, causing them “superficial injuries,” according to Irish Lt. Col. Eamon O’Siochrú, head of the Irish team that is part of United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The explosion occurred near the town of Rmaileh, just outside Lebanon’s third biggest city, Sidon, 35 kilometers south of Beirut. The blast […]

Some 20 years after its founding, the Palestinian organization Hamas remains little understood in the West. Although it is invoked nearly daily in the media, it has been the subject of only a very small number of serious studies. The most common error made by observers in considering contemporary Islamist movements — and notably, Hamas — is that of attempting to grasp them in terms of concepts and modes of thought that are proper to the West. Most western analyses of the phenomenon of Islamism tend to underestimate or even obscure a fundamental element that is common to all the […]