MOMBASA, Kenya — Kenya won a quiet but significant victory over Somali pirates that have waged a devastating campaign against its maritime economy when a judge at the Mombasa federal court formally charged eight Somali pirates with felonies under Kenyan law on Dec. 11. The eight men were captured by the British Royal Navy in November while trying to hijack a Danish merchant ship near the Yemeni coast. The Dec. 11 hearing was brief. The defense requested more time to prepare, and the case was promptly deferred until January. But the fact that it wasn’t dismissed outright represents a major [...]
When Barack Obama takes office on Jan. 20, his foreign policy will almost certainly be consumed by the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Obama would do well to pay equal attention to a third ongoing insurgency, one that is currently more violent than the war in Iraq and possibly more threatening to American interests. This insurgency is raging not half a world away in the Middle East, but just across America’s southern frontier in Mexico. Since 2006, Mexico has descended into a multifaceted narco-insurgency. Well-armed and well-funded cartels are viciously fighting the government and one another over control of [...]
PEACE MISSION — According to a soon-to-be published book on the history of U.S.-Vatican relations, President George Bush told an emissary of Pope John Paul II in early March 2003 that Jesus was guiding him in deciding whether to invade Iraq. Cardinal Pio Laghi, a senior Vatican diplomat, had come to Washington with a last-minute appeal from the pope to avert an American attack on Iraq. According to the cardinal’s own account, quoted in “Parallel Empires: The Vatican and the United States — Two Centuries of Alliance and Conflict,” his meeting with Bush in the Oval Office began with the [...]
