WPR Blog Archive

In the aftermath of the arrest in Barcelona of 10 alleged Islamist extremists earlier this month, it has been widely reported that the group was planning imminent suicide attacks on the public transportation system of the Catalonian capital and perhaps additional attacks elsewhere in Europe. The evidence released thus far, however, does not support this scenario and indeed the statements of Spanish authorities contradict one another on several key aspects of the case. It was Spanish judge Ismael Moreno who, in ordering the detention of the 10 men last week, announced that a suicide attack had been imminent. The judge’s […]

In 2007, Al-Qaida in Iraq was responsible for 4,552 attacks against civilians, 3,870 civilian murders, and 17,815 injuries, according to briefing slides posted on the Internet by the Multi-National Forces Iraq. The slides offer a fascinating glimpse inside the operations of AQI, and the moral depths to which its members will sink. For example, the slides include a look at a grisly AQI torture manual, complete with illustrated instructions on how to drill through a hand, as well as a picture of two Iraqi girls injured in AQI’s April bombing of the Kirkuk Girls Primary School. Download the pdf file […]

Parag Khanna‘s cover article in yesterday’s New York Times magazine, “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony,” is an impressively meaty piece of geopolitical analysis in the realist tradition. The article is dense with insights and propositions worth contemplating, whether or not one believes the picture he paints of the present and future geopolitical situation are valid. His thesis: the era in which the United States is the lone superpower is ending, and the world is moving inexorably toward a tri-polar balance of power, with the United States, Europe and China as the poles. This new global order, he writes, will be multi-civilizational […]

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was in Paris last week and he gave an interview to the French daily Le Figaro. This is what he had to say about an Egyptian proposal to hold four party talks on Gaza involving Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas: I don’t see how we can accept the Egyptian proposal. We have nothing to say to Hamas. We speak to them when we interrogate them in our prisons. But this is a fundamentalist group that says openly that it has received a divine mandate to destroy Israel. One should, on the contrary, weaken […]

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned yesterday after a no-confidence vote in parliament that was, to say the least, contentious, the New York Times reports: ROME — Italy’s government finally fell Thursday, after Prime Minister Romano Prodi lost a confidence vote that made it clear that Italy’s leaders know they face a deep political and economic crisis but are venomously divided over how to solve it. Emblematic of those divisions, during the debate one senator rushed in fury to the desk of a colleague, Stefano Cusumano, and taunted and apparently tried to attack him. Mr. Cusumano, 60, reportedly cried, then […]

Apart from “foreigner crime” (see the previous WPR report), the other issue that has been dominating the headlines in the German media in the run up to important regional elections on Sunday is the decision of the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia to shutter a plant in Bochum in North Rhine-Westphalia and to transfer the production capacity to the Romanian city of Cluj. In an interview with the public television network ZDF, the Christian Democratic governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, Jürgen Rüttgers, went so far as to describe Nokia as a kind of “locust”: namely, for having benefited from public subsidies […]

Next month, the U.S. government will begin negotiations with the government of Iraq concerning the terms under which the United States will operate in Iraq after the expiration of the previous U.N. mandate. As the New York Times reports today, the negotiations with Iraq will center around a number of difficult issues, including immunity from local laws for U.S. contractors and whether the U.S. military will be able to operate unilaterally, or will be required to gain some level of approval from Iraqi officials. However, the substantive debate in Congress, concerns whether or not the “status of forces” agreement will […]

An article in last Friday’s edition of the French daily Le Monde provides an illustration of the disturbing extremes to which environmentalist discourse can go in Europe nowadays. Entitled “More than 10,000 Exotic Species Imperil European Biodiversity,” the article begins: “The invaders are among us. It is a story that seems like a science fiction film, but it is happening in Europe, under the worried eye of scientists who have long observed the wave of invasions, but had not imagined that it could take on such dimensions.” The “invaders” in question? Some 10,670 “alien” plant and animal species. The article […]

In examining the Bush administration’s Plan B for Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, we noted previously in this space that the new chief of staff of the Pakistani army, Ashfaq Kiyani, figures prominently among those who are viewed to be forces for moderation and stability. Our own Roland Flamini was among the first to note that Kiyani’s name was being mentioned hopefully in Washington. Today, in a column for the Washington Post, David Ignatius reports U.S. Navy Adm. William J. Fallon, commander of U.S. Central Command, views Kiyani as a positive force as well: Fallon’s […]

In a move with potentially devastating consequences for the effectiveness of U.N. counterterrorism measures, an Advocate General at the European Court of Justice, Miguel Poiares Maduro, recommended to the court last week that it annul EU financial sanctions against suspected al-Qaida financier, Yassin Abdullah Kadi (aka “Qadi”). The sanctions were originally applied by the EU in 2001 in conformity with U.N. Security Council Resolutions. Kadi’s name was placed on the U.N.’s consolidated list of Qaida or Taliban affiliated persons and entities shortly after the 9/11 attacks. A series of U.N. Security Council Resolutions require U.N. member states to freeze the […]

Last year saw serious setbacks in the progress of political rights and civil liberties, according to the latest Freedom in the World report from Freedom House, released Jan. 16. South Asia saw the most pronounced negative change, according to the report, but the region of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and parts of Africa also had significant declines in freedom. The number of countries rated “Free,” “Partly Free,” and “Not Free,” at 90, 63 and 42 respectively, did not change significantly from 2006, but researchers found significant backward movement for several countries within each category, in many cases […]

The most-read World Politics Review articles from Monday, Jan. 14 through yesterday: 1. State Department’s Plan to Cut Diplomats is Ill-Conceived2. Transatlantic Intelligencer: Saddam’s Money, German Iranian Trade, and More3. Iran’s Hormuz Actions Help Israel Make its Case4. Battle Over Suharto’s Legacy a Test for Modern Indonesia5. Colombia-Venezuela Rift Grows as Chávez Appears to Confirm Support for FARC6. More Allied, Not U.S., Forces Key to Success in Afghanistan7. Hamas and Islamic Millenarianism: What the West Doesn’t Recognize8. Indian Soaps Fall to Islamic Censorship in Afghanistan9. Militant ‘Farmer’ and French Government Make Common Cause in GM Crop Ban10. Corridors of Power: […]

The media coverage of the fall 2005 riots in France’s banlieues made the image of burning cars into an international icon of French urban mayhem. But in fact the deliberate burning of cars has been a large-scale and endemic phenomenon in the banlieues for many years now — even in times of relative “calm.” It is so widespread and common that it appears to be a kind of urban pastime. The French daily Le Figaro claims, however, to have discovered that the problem is at least worse somewhere else. Thus, in an article titled “The Burning of Cars is More […]

In “Waterworld,” a dispatch from Bangladesh in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Robert D. Kaplan uses the country’s current experience to examine a number of difficult problems faced by the developing world — from the inability of shallow-rooted democracy to handle certain ills, to how NGOs compete with criminal and violent elements to fill the societal gaps left by corrupt and inefficient governments. But one pontential problem he highlights particularly caught our eye — the way in which global warming, especially in Asia, could contribute to the spread of Islamic extremism: [Bangladesh’s traditional] low-calorie version of Islam is […]

On Nov. 9, 2005, Muriel Degauque, a 38-year-old Belgium convert to Islam, blew herself up in a suicide attack against an American convoy near Baghdad. She is reputed to have thus become the first Western woman to commit a suicide attack. Five young men were accused by Belgian authorities of belonging to a terrorist network that sent Degauque and at least three other persons to Iraq to take part in the jihad against American and allied forces. One of the young men, Youness Loukili, lost a leg fighting against American forces during the siege of Fallujah. After initially denying having […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Pretrial hearings for two French journalists facing a possible death sentence for “undermining state security” in the West African state of Niger got underway Tuesday, Jan. 15. The journalists, Pierre Creisson and Thomas Dandois, both employed by the Franco-German TV Arte, were arrested on Dec. 17 for interviewing Tuareg rebels in northern Niger, in violation of a state law against any broadcast of activities associated with the 11-month old northern rebellion. The two journalists initially told Niger authorities that they would be traveling to the southern part of the country to compile a report on bird […]

When the Washington Post reported last week that Zalmay Khalilzad, the American representative at the United Nations, was considering running for president of Afghanistan, Khalilzad publicly denied the story. But that hasn’t stopped some of his friends both in Washington and in Afghanistan from going forward with a plan to draft him to succeed President Hamid Karzai, whose term ends in October of next year. A Khalilzad-for-president committee is about to be formed in the United States to advance his candidacy, according to a well-informed source. The forceful, Afghan-born envoy played a key role in shaping post-invasion Afghanistan. At the […]