New UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has started making new appointments and agenda setting at the United Nations. The NY Times reports thatVijay Nambiar of India, a special adviser to Mr. Ban’s predecessor, Kofi Annan, will be his chief of staff, and Michèle Montas, an award-winning Haitian broadcaster, will head the spokesman’s division, replacing Stéphane Dujarric of France, a...
Whenever I discuss Saddam here in New Zealand, people always want to know to what extent the U.S. supported his regime. Fortunately, I can now refer them to Juan Cole's recent post "For Whom the Bell Tolls: Top Ten Ways the US Enabled Saddam Hussein." Summarizing, the ten ways are as follows: The CIA was...
The stroke of midnight not only heralded the New Year, but also the entrance of Romania and Bulgaria into the EU. The BBC story is here. The EU has now grown to 27 countries with a population of half a billion people. See a time-lapse map of EU expansion here. As the borders of “Europe” move eastward, the question...
Juan Cole has an excellent article on Saddam's execution at Salon.com. Particularly interesting is what he has to say about the decision to execute Saddam today, which appears to be designed to further alienate Iraq's Sunnis:The tribunal also had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam's hanging. It was a slap in the face to...
Let us hope that his death doesn't breathe even more life into the insurgency. I fear that it will. ...
According to reports, Saddam will be executed before the Muslim holiday Eid Al-Adha, which begins this Sunday. Saddam will hanged, although he has expressed a preference for a firing squad. The Iraqi government's decision echoes the Nuremberg trial, where the IMT deliberately denied the condemned defendants a firing squad, the preferred method of execution for soldiers. Indeed,...
I tend to agree with Roger's sober assessment of the value of blogging — if we can till a small patch of otherwise unplowed soil, that's something accomplished, but we shouldn't assume much more value than that. One sign that the blogging phenomenon may have peaked is the number of abandoned blogs one comes across these days — blogs...
Whatever one may think about the presidency of Gerald Ford, he lived up to his self-description as a committed internationalist. And if one were to name his most significant international achievement, the Helsinki Accords would be high on the list. Indeed, Daniel Thomas in his book The Helsinki Effect argues that the Helsinki Accords contributed directly to the...
If you are interested in the history of the Middle East, I highly recommend this flash video, which compresses 5,000 years of imperial ambitions in the area into a mere 90 seconds. Who knew the Mongols had such a gigantic empire? UPDATE: The Maps of War site, which created the Empires video, is a treasure-trove of interesting information. Check...
Bloomberg has an interesting article today on how the US's increasingly onerous visa restrictions are causing significant harm to American businesses.Companies say U.S. rules have become so onerous in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that it's often simpler to meet customers, business partners and employees elsewhere. Exxon Mobil Corp. has resorted to customer meetings in a London...
The print edition of yesterday's NY Times had an above-the-fold story about the possibilities for immigration reform in the new Congress under the headline, "Bipartisan Group Drafting Bill for a New Path to Citizenship". I still don't quite get the framing of this latest round of immigration politics in citizenship terms. The question is who will get permanent...
On the heels of this stunt, see this op-ed co-authored by Harvard lawprof Robert Mnookin in the IHT as well as this from Crooked Timber's Belgian contributor Ingrid Robeyns. Perhaps Belgium will pave the way to the deconstruction of some non-East Bloc states. And why not, especially under the umbrella of the EU? How sentimental can one...
