Attacking Iran is not a long-term solution
Newt Gingrich
September 9, 2006 09:00 AM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/newt_gingrich/2006/09/attacking_iran_is=
_not_a_longte.html
Iran's pursuit of a nuclear program in defiance of the United Nations
has led some to call for military strikes against Iran's nuclear
facilities to prevent the terror-sponsoring regime from obtaining a
nuclear weapon. While I agree that a military option to replace the
regime must be left on the table, I worry that some believe a military
strike on Iran's nuclear installations is a viable long-term solution
to stopping the Iranian regime's pursuit of greater power in the
region.
In truth, until the Iranian regime itself is replaced with one that
does not sponsor terrorism and does not seek a nuclear program, then
the threat will remain and grow.
Running out of space
John Palmer
September 9, 2006 07:00 AM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_palmer/2006/09/post_359.html
It is commonly observed that the ferocity of the Blair/Brown conflict
stands in stark contrast with the slight or even non-existing policy
differences between the prime minister and the chancellor. But this
only underlines a more general rule of contemporary political science:
the inverse ratio which exists between the intensity of political
conflict and the gradual disappearance of real political or ideological
differences.
It is a rule which not only applies within parties - where some common,
shared values might be expected - but also between political parties.
The past 20 years have seen a remarkable contraction - almost
disappearance - of major political issues of principle dividing the
mainstream political parties. It is a phenomenon which not only is at
work in British politics but throughout most democratic countries. It
has enormous implications not only for the future of political parties
but also for the legitimacy of the wider democratic political process.
The real path to 9/11
Jeremy Pikser
September 8, 2006 08:43 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeremy_pikser/2006/09/the_real_road_to_=
911.html
So my email inbox is jammed with appeals to stop the outrage of
far-right propaganda being broadcast this weekend on ABC. Comparisons
are made with CBS pushing its Reagan docudrama to the hinterlands of
Showtime.
Of course, I seem to remember the people who are now saying the
right-wing garbage (and I have no doubt that the characterization is
absolutely fair and balanced) which ABC plans to broadcast should be
banned, are the same people who claimed that the Reagan Doc should be
shown as a matter of free speech, calling for brave resistance to the
evils of censorship.
Motherly values
Laura Barcella
September 8, 2006 07:30 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/laura_barcella/2006/09/mortgage_moms.ht=
ml
According to the Washington Post (and the ever-buzzing blogosphere),
America's 2006 midterm elections just might be swayed by a new
contingency of awkwardly-named, pissed-off female voters: "mortgage
moms".
The mortgage moms are, really, yesterday's "security moms" - the swing
bloc made up of married women with kids, whose worries about terrorism
made them "an essential part of Republican victories in 2002 and 2004".
Women on top
George Monbiot
September 8, 2006 03:50 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/george_monbiot/2006/09/post_360.html
If ever women needed an argument for establishing some distance from
the other sex, the misogyny evident in some of the responses to my last
post provides it.
My point was this: that the Greenham Common peace camp's longevity was
due to the fact that it created a safe space for women. It is true that
many of the women there stayed for reasons unconnected with cruise
missiles - the foremost of which was that there were no men.
The art of contrition
David Beresford
September 8, 2006 02:50 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_beresford/2006/09/the_art_of_cont=
rition.html
In the very strange society that is South Africa, where expressions of
contrition have become an art form, there can have been few quite as
bizarre as when the country's much feared apartheid-era police minister
went down on his knees and washed the feet of a black man.
Adrian Vlok continued what might be described as his pilgrimage of
atonement on Sunday when he made an appearance at a church in Soweto
where the man at whose feet he knelt, the Rev Frank Chikane, has been a
preacher for 16 years.
The race taboo
Brian Whitaker
September 8, 2006 01:43 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brian_whitaker/2006/09/racism_in_the_mi=
ddle_east.html
Racism is a worldwide phenomenon. In some countries it's met with
disapproval, in others with denial. The Arab countries, mostly, fall
into the latter category. The A to Z of ethnic and religious groups in
the Middle East embraces Alawites, Armenians, Assyrians, Baha'is,
Berbers, Chaldeans, Copts, Druzes, Ibadis, Ismailis, Jews, Kurds,
Maronites, Sahrawis, Tuareq, Turkmen, Yazidis and Zaidis (by no means
an exhaustive list), and yet serious discussion of ethnic/religious
diversity and its place in society is a long-standing taboo.
If the existence of non-Arab or non-Muslim groups is acknowledged at
all, it is usually only to declare how wonderfully everyone gets along.
The roots of this attitude are partly a result of colonial history and,
up to a point, the reasons are understandable. The trouble is that
anyone who questions this make-believe harmony and tries to address the
issue openly and honestly is liable to be accused of spreading "fitna",
or social discord.
Peer-to-peer surveillance
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1868319,00.html
James Harkin
Saturday September 9, 2006
The Guardian
This week, a 28-year-old welder called Craig Moore discovered just how
hard it is to give our digital backdrop the slip when he was jailed for
blowing up a speed camera. Snapped for driving too fast, Moore drove
back later that evening and blew the offending machine to smithereens,
forgetting that its hard drive was as sturdy as an aeroplane's black
box recorder. In a double whammy, Moore was damned not only by the
images on the smouldering hard drive, but by the tracking device fitted
to his van by his employer.
At least Moore knew what he was up against. In the age of ubiquitous
digital equipment, with more cameras and mics lying around than there
are on the set of The Truman Show, it is all too easy to unwittingly
find our activities captured in digital form. We all know by now that
we can be clocked on CCTV cameras, and snapped by camera phones, but
it's only relatively recently that we have realised the vulnerability
of a simple conversation. Last week, a speech by George Bush to mark
the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina was interrupted by snatches of
ladies' room gossip by a CNN news anchor who didn't realise her
microphone was still switched on. A month before that, a private chat
between Tony Blair and George was broadcast to the world via an
unintentionally open mic, and two of the most powerful men in the world
were caught joshing each other like superannuated rappers.
Face to Faith
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1868345,00.html
Jerusalem is the spiritual home of the Jews, but it can become a centre
of tolerance and respect for all faiths
Mordechai Beck
Saturday September 9, 2006
The Guardian
Under Jerusalem's hot sun, Gabriel Barkay is guiding students of the
Archeological Seminars group around the ancient city. The mature
students - studying to become English-speaking tour guides - listen
enraptured. Barkay, professor of archaeology at Bar Ilan University and
an authority on Middle Eastern archaeology, points out the tomb of
Isaiah the prophet, the palace of the Pharoah's daughter, the first
domestic toilet, the complex water system that fed Jerusalem from the
Gihon spring, and many other items revealed beneath the archaeologist's
spade in the past few decades.
He began digging in this area in the 1970s, and found hundreds of
shards and other objects dating back to the first Temple period. Prior
to his excavations, a long list of archaeologists had been lured to the
site, drawn by Biblical associations and a religious commitment to
"prove" the sacred texts right.
A policy of punishment
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1868381,00.html
Your people understand the Palestinians suffer a great injustice, Mr
Blair - but you are adding to it
Ismail Haniyeh
Saturday September 9, 2006
The Guardian
Despite the historic responsibility of successive British governments
for what has befallen our people, from the Balfour declaration to the
catastrophe of dispossession, Palestinians had hoped that the new
generation of British politicians might break with the past and stand
for truth and justice in the Middle East.
Regrettably, however, the last decade has witnessed the most unfair and
one-sided British policy towards the region since the creation of the
state of Israel in our homeland close to 60 years ago. The problem has
been the unquestioning attachment of Tony Blair's government to the
Clinton and then Bush administrations, which have seen the Middle East
through Israeli eyes only.
Camera obscured
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1868315,00.html
For defying the Chinese authorities and taking his film to the Cannes
festival, the director Lou Ye has been banned from film-making. So why
did he do it?
Jonathan Watts
Saturday September 9, 2006
The Guardian
For a director who has just been slapped with a five-year film-making
ban, Lou Ye appears remarkably unperturbed as he describes how he was
hauled before the Chinese censors last Friday for a dressing-down that
made headlines around the world. "I thought there would be some
trouble, though not this bad," he says. "When I heard their decision, I
couldn't help a bitter smile. It was the same thing that happened to me
in the past, the same thing that many directors have experienced. I bet
even the official who made the announcement was bored."
Bush faces Republican revolt over terror trials
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,,1868462,00.html
=B7 Worries over treatment of Guant=E1namo detainees
=B7 Defendants to be barred from seeing evidence
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Saturday September 9, 2006
The Guardian
President George Bush yesterday faced growing opposition from his
fellow Republicans to a pillar of his war on terror: his plans to
prosecute detainees at Guant=E1namo at military commissions.
Mr Bush had hoped to use the fifth anniversary of the September 11
attacks on Monday to shift the focus of November's congressional
elections away from the war on Iraq to national security. But the
strategy misfired with key Republicans balking at a White House
proposal for legislation on military tribunals that would deny
Guant=E1namo detainees the right to see classified evidence against
them.
Changing face of a giant that never stops moving
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1868373,00.html
China, 30 years after Mao
Jonathan Watts
Saturday September 9, 2006
The Guardian
Thirty years ago today, China began mourning a leader whom many
worshipped with cult-like devotion. At 3pm every factory and train in
the country blasted its whistle. Then there was a three-minute silence.
China came to a halt.
Since then, it has never stopped moving. Mao's death unleashed a
pent-up energy that has created one of the great transformations of
human history. Thanks to a policy of opening and reform, the backward,
agrarian China of 1976 is now a global economic power.
The spectacle is all
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1867675,00.html
Tariq Ali admires Lawrence Wright's reconstruction of the lives of the
main characters in the 9/11 horror show, The Looming Tower
Saturday September 9, 2006
The Guardian
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda's Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright
480pp, Allen Lane, =A320
Forty years ago, in a scathing and prescient manifesto against consumer
capitalism and celebrity culture entitled The Society of the Spectacle,
the French situationist philosopher Guy Debord described everyday life
as "a permanent opium war". Modern capitalism was an "immense
accumulation of spectacles" and what was once "truly lived has become
mere representation".
This is helpful. We can better understand the impact of the sensational
counter-spectacle of 9/11, described by its principal inspirer as an
"America struck by Almighty Allah in its vital organs". Vital, of
course, only because of their symbolic importance. Might Allah have
been reading Debord? The events transformed Osama bin Laden into a
global celebrity, a sinister Darth Vader figure who is an object of
fascination for friend and enemy alike. Even though al-Qaida itself is
clearly in decline, the world is preoccupied by wars and occupations
old and new and a new triumvirate of Muslim leaders has emerged
(Ahmadinejad in Iran, Nasrallah in Lebanon and Moqtada al-Sadr in
Iraq), while the global publishing empires continue to produce books
that take us back to the events of 9/11. Another example, perhaps, of
ways in which the military-ideological-cultural dominance of the United
States can provincialise the rest of the world.
A fistful of Fredericks
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1867680,00.html
Christopher Clark's excellent history of Prussia, Iron Kingdom, shows
just how bad some popular history is, says Patrick Wright
Saturday September 9, 2006
The Guardian
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947
by Christopher Clark
816pp, Allen Lane, =A330
Rumours emanating from the publishing world suggest that, with the
possible exception of books about queens, the "history boom" of recent
years has already gone into steep decline. Let us hope that the sands
into which it has run are not those forming the soil of Brandenburg
around Berlin. For it is on this unpromising terrain that Christopher
Clark's excellent tome begins.
It's the Russians wot won it
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1867698,00.html
NIcholas Lezard on Richard Overy's eye-opening account of 1945, Why the
Allies Won
Nicholas Lezard
Saturday September 9, 2006
The Guardian
Why the Allies Won
by Richard Overy
Pimlico, =A39.99
There has been a glut of second world war paperbacks thumping through
the letterbox in the past few weeks, which puzzled me until I realised
that they had all come out originally last year to commemorate (not
cash in on) the 50th anniversary of the end of the conflict. Some of
them are very good -Derek Robinson's Invasion, 1940 (out next week, a
great read), say, or Richard Evans's The Third Reich in Power (actually
about the run-up, in Germany, to the war). They tend towards the same
kind of cover design (the title in red sans serif capitals,
black-and-white photo), but this book stuck out because of that "why"
in the title. Not "how"; "why", which puts both the Allies' purpose,
and the inevitability of the war's conclusion, under careful scrutiny.
.
|
