WPR Blog Archive

The Greens have historically been associated with the left, allied with the moderate and far left on the local, national and European level. But according to this article from PressEurop, that could be changing. In both Brussels and Germany, the Greens have now agreed to cooperate with the liberals and Christian Democrats. This, in particular, caught my eye: Elsewhere, Belgian ecologist party MEP Philippe Lamberts argues thatGreens share certain values with the right. “Socialists and free-marketliberals believe that the measure of quality of life is your materialstatus,” he says. “We think, as Christian Democrats do, that the goodlife is not […]

On Friday, Aung San Suu Kyi will celebrate her 64th birthday. As in previous years, she will do so from the confines of a captive space — but not the family home that has been her prison for 13 of the last 19 years. This year, the Nobel peace laureate will spend the day in Yangon’s Insein prison, awaiting the verdict of a trial largely viewed as purely political. Suu Kyi faces a sentence of five years in prison over charges she broke the terms of her house arrest by giving quarter to an American man who illegally swam to […]

So far, I’ve been agnostic about whether the vote count of the Iranian election was rigged or not. But this CSM interview with Farideh Farhi of the University of Hawaii (via Yigal Schliefer) is pretty compelling. As part of her decades-long research on Iran, Farhi has routinely gone over historical data from Iranian elections with a fine-tooth comb. She concludes that the Interior Ministry “pulled [the numbers] out of their hats,” and that the announced results are a “brazen manipulation.” As an empiricist, I give that kind of analysis more weight than either the educated conjecture of the Leveretts arguing […]

Tea-leaf reading is about all we can do, after all. But having said that, this Noah Millman exercise in that fine art (via Andrew Sullivan) is a solid primer in terms of which moves to watch in the internal power struggle currently being decided in Tehran. Two thoughts. First, Le Monde is “reporting” (I put that in quotes given how uncertain the situation on the ground is) that Mir Hossein Moussavi has called on his supporters to cancel the planned opposition demonstration today, after supporters of the regime scheduled a counter-rally in the same location one hour prior. The decision […]

I’m sure I won’t be the one to convince him of why, but I disagree with Michael Cohen when he says that the “fetishization and enshrinement” of COIN is “a slippery slope for more not less US military intervention.” In the same post, Cohen rightfully reminds us that trends in military doctrine have a pretty short half-life. The U.S. didn’t go around looking for places where we could unleash an air war in the late-90s, after all, even though that trend, as Cohen insightfully points out, was all the rage after the Kosovo campaign. Surely that’s an argument against his […]

World Politics Review managing editor Judah Grunstein appeared on Bloggingheads.tv yesterday with Henry Farrell to discuss coverage and implications of the Iranian elections, the EU parliament elections, copyright law and drone strikes in Pakistan. The full video can be seen here. Below is the segment on coverage of the Iranian elections:

Another thought: If Ahmadinejad did actually win, and the reformists end up overturningthe regime, our sympathy would essentially be going to a minority-ruleregime of the privileged urban elites over the rural masses. In otherwords, exactly the kind of revolution that progressive Americans havegenerally been opposed to. The ’60s and ’70s Latin American revolutionsso popular with the American left, for instance, were the exactopposite: peasant revolutions against urban elites. Very interesting how globalization has essentially closed the age ofthe proletarian/peasant revolution and restored, on a planetary scale, the originalrevolutionary bourgeois of the 18th century.

Clearly something is happening in Tehran. It is premature to know exactly how deep and broad the opposition really is. Reports of 2-3 million protestors, for instance, seem farfetched in a city whose population is 7 million. But even if the number is far less, the massive demonstrations in defiance of a ruthless regime are terribly moving and awe-inspiring. Events like these separate the realists from the idealists, I suppose. I’ve been called a realist, but it’s hard to apply cold reason to such an inspiring demonstration of the human aspiration to break free of the chains imposed by others. […]

I’ve been digesting the news from Iran, in bits and pieces over the weekend, and a bit more methodically today. And there are a few threads that I think need some teasing out, since they’ve tended to get mixed up in the weave of passion and empathy that’s characterized the real-time blog coverage I’ve seen so far. To begin with, it’s important not to let enthusiasm for the cause of Iranian reformist voters and outrage over their treatment at the hands of the Iranian regime in the election’s aftermath translate into certainty over what remains a very opaque outcome. Western […]

Today’s selection comes a week late, since it talks about D-Day, and the debt the French owe to us ‘Marruhcunz (as I learned how to say in the Big D). And no, the song isn’t performed by a Fox News commentator, but by Michel Sardou, a French cultural rarity: the right-wing artist. The opening stanza about says it all: If the ‘Mericans hadn’t been thereYou would all be in GermanyTalking about I don’t know whatSaluting I don’t know who. That’s where he gives the Heil Hitler salute, as if to say, You guys really are a bunch of ungrateful bastidz. […]

It was reported this week in the Boston Globe that President Barack Obama, as part of a broad nuclear arms reduction initiative, will call for the creation of an international supply house for uranium that will be open to nations that want to pursue peaceful nuclear power projects, but denied to anyone wishing to make a bomb. While not specifically aimed at nuclear “rogues” Iran or North Korea, the idea is obviously meant to put to the test their claims, at least in Iran’s case, that their nuclear ambitions are entirely peaceful. According to an unnamed administration official quoted in […]

SANDAKAN, Malaysia — Relations between the Abu Sayyaf and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) are souring as the Filipino rebel factions increasingly differ on strategy for the pursuit of a homeland for indigenous people and the broader Islamic community. The pair occupy the tiny island haven of Jolo in the Sulu Sea where sources said the more conservative MNLF are increasingly irritated by an escalation in violence in the region baring all the hallmarks of the Abu Sayyaf. “The MNLF is up the hill and the Abu Sayyaf is down the hill and that’s the way they prefer it,” […]

I don’t want to make too much of this NY Times story about al-Qaida operatives making their way from Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. It’s based on a pretty small sample size, as well as on a “senior Obama administration official” who has every reason to attribute “some of the movement to ‘the enormous heat we’ve been putting on the leadership and themid-ranks’ with Predator strikes, launched from both Pakistan andAfghanistan.” After all, widening the drone strikes in Pakistan was one of President Barack Obama’s campaign stances, so it’s no surprise to see his administration pushing back against the growing […]

I’ve already flagged a few stories in the past couple months about Russia’s “Bremer approach” to professionalizing its military. This NY Times piece is basically an update, but with a twist: The malcontents quoted in it are active-duty Russian officers. That would be surprising for a piece running in the St. Petersburg Times. To see it in the NY Times is positively shocking. Russia’s re-emergence is far from a straight-line graph. Lots of deferred maintenance, including ongoing violent separatism in the Caucasus, that wasn’t taken care of while the cash was flowing in. Modernizing its military is necessary. But if […]

Trials for 18 people accused in gruesome murders of albinos got underway this week in Tanzania and Burundi, leading to calls for greater efforts to end widespread discrimination against those with the condition. While it might sound like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, the murder of albinos and sale of their body parts to witch doctors is very real — and a booming business on the continent. Dead albinos as young as 8 years old have been discovered with their organs removed, and heads and/or limbs removed. The body parts are worth thousands of dollars to witch doctors, […]

More signals are emerging of remarkable movement on the Turkey-Kurdish question. Turkey and Iraq just signed an MoU on military cooperation, which alone says a lot, given the fact that Turkey is still routinely violating Iraqi airspace and sovereignty in its campaign against the PKK. Meanwhile, Ankara’s engagement with Irbil, capital of the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq, continues, with a planned visit by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. Tangentially, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party has been invited to both Baghdad (by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani) and to Washington (by President Barack Obama), in advance of the U.S. withdrawal […]

For some reason, this sentence from the CNAS report (.pdf) on Afghanistan and Pakistan that I wrote up yesterday kept rattling around the cranium: But because populations in civil wars tend to side with whichever group exercises control, protecting the population must take precedence over all other considerations. That sums up in a nutshell the central premise of COIN doctrine, from which all of its operational priorities are derived. Now, to be very clear, unlike Michael Cohen, I think that the COIN doctrine represents an enormous advance in the U.S. approach to warfare, both strategically and politically. Strategically, it represents […]