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Commentary Week In Review
By Guy Taylor
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01 Jun 2007
The Commentary Week in Review is posted on the blog every Friday. Drawing from more than two dozen English-language news outlets worldwide, the column highlights a handful of the week's notable op-eds.
Brazil's Sugar-Cane Revolution
Brazilian President Lula da Silva argued in the May 31 Guardian that "developing countries cannot be expected to share an equal burden in offsetting the environmental impacts mostly caused by richer countries, currently still responsible for 65% of overall greenhouse gas emissions."
Noting that his own country's current "energy matrix is 45% renewable, against a worldwide average of 14%," Lula asserted that Brazil is actually "determined to be even more ambitious."
"We have been reducing our greenhouse gases emissions for over 30 years by substituting fossil fuels with sugarcane-based ethanol. This has led to a dramatic fall in domestic petroleum consumption and pollution. Vehicles currently topping sales in Brazil are 'flex-fuel,' which means that they can run on petrol, ethanol or any combination of the two."
Claiming "Brazil is open to requests for technical cooperation in biofuels production and marketing," Lula stressed the "revolution will only come about if ethanol and biodiesel are freely traded internationally as energy commodities. In order to make Brazil's biofuels model widely available, rich countries must open up their markets to developing countries by eliminating agricultural subsidies and other protectionist barriers to biofuels imports."
Combination Punch To Democracy in Asia
Writing in the May 31 International Herald Tribune, Philip Bowring zeroed in on two recent developments, which he claimed have delivered huge blows to liberal, plural democracy in Thailand and Malaysia: The dissolution of Thai Rak Thai, the party of Thaksin Shinawatra, who was deposed as prime minister of Thailand by a coup last September, and the decision in Malaysia to deny a woman the right to convert from Islam to another religion.
Bowring asserted the Malaysia ruling "will be seen in most of the rest of the world as an example of Muslim arrogance, intolerance and obscurantism, which are particularly out of place in a country where more than 40 percent of the population is not Muslim (and non-Muslims are a majority in some states)."
As for the decision in Thailand by a constitutional tribunal to dissolve Thai Rak Thai, Bowring noted that "Thaksin without doubt abused his power and was more adept than anyone at Thai money politics. His attempt at populist authoritarianism certainly needed reining in."
"But," he argued, "the coalition of military, royalists, senior bureaucrats and some self-proclaimed democrats are not merely attempting to prevent Thaksin's return to power via the ballot box. They have produced a draft new constitution that limits the power of the executive and expands the role of non-elected senators and judiciary officials at the expense of elected members."
The "Weakness" of Americans in Iraq
The next few months are critical to Iraq, according to Roland Wilson, who observed in the May 31 Times of London that "for the past year, security concerns have demanded priority. Now politics has to catch up."
"Agreements between sectarian and ethnic leaders on dividing Iraq's future oil revenue, allowing Baathists back into work and rewriting parts of the Constitution to address the grievances of Sunnis who virtually boycotted the original drafting -- all of these would help solidify the U.S. security surge, which has made some gains while being apparently powerless to stop brazen kidnappings like that of the five Britons this week," wrote Wilson.
Wilson, who is The Times' foreign editor, offered some rich narrative observations from a recent visit he made to Baghdad:
The mood among the Iraqi politicians, coalition forces and Western diplomats appeared at best uncertain. Only the Peruvian soldiers who man checkpoints gave nothing away; others let their body language do the talking. Hussein al-Falluji, an MP from the largest Sunni bloc, says: "When I sit with the Americans, I feel a kind of weakness [from them]. When I look in their eyes I feel that they are not the same as in 2003. From the inside they feel like they are failing here." ...Meanwhile, street-level Shia leaders breathe fiery resistance. "If the occupiers stay here, we will not develop for 100 years," says a commander of the Mahdi Army who helps to control much of what goes on in the volatile slum of Sadr City.
Is This a Hostage Crisis in Iran?
With news that Iran has formally charged three Americans as spies and propagandists -- click here for my own WPR story on the matter -- Michael Ledeen suggested in a column posted at National Review Online on May 31 that American journalists and politicians have "totally missed a headline."
Ledeen pointed out that while the press has homed in on the case of Haleh Esfandiaria, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, who along with Parnaz Azima, a journalist for the U.S. government-backed radio Farda, and Kian Tajbakhsh, a consultant working for George Soros' Open Society Institute, was charged by Iran, journalists are ignoring the bigger reality that "there are now five American hostages in Iran."
The other two, according to Ledeen, are Ali Shakeri, a founding board member at the University of California, Irvine's Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, and Robert A. Levinson, a former FBI officer reportedly investigating tobacco smuggling on behalf of a private client.
"Each case has been largely treated by itself, almost as if it were an oddity, something requiring a special explanation, instead of another piece in a luminously clear pattern whose meaning should be intuitively obvious to us all," wrote Ledeen, whose column titled "The Invisible Crisis," was topped by the ominous question: "What if Iran took hostages and no one noticed?"
The Commentary Week In Review draws from links aggregated every weekday morning in WPR's Media Roundup, which you can receive by email for free by registering now.