Articles

With the surge in Iraq to establish security an utter failure and the British having fled Basra, Washington’s propagandists are in no mood to set another trap for themselves by making bold policy pronouncements about Afghanistan. A detailed review, forced by the failure of America and NATO to subdue the resistance in Afghanistan, has been launched without fanfare.

Ethiopia’s war in Muslim Somalia has been one of the major news stories of the last year. However, less well-known is the fact that Somali Muslims living under Ethiopian rule in the Ogaden have a 700-year history of resistance against Ethiopian rule. FAHAD ANSARI reports.

The fighting in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp outside Tripoli last year drew attention to a little-noticed phenomenon in Lebanon, the growth of salafi jihadi influence among the Sunni community. NASR SALEM discusses the background and implications of this development.

Three weeks after General Pervez Musharraf hit Pakistan's crumbling political system on November 3 by declaring a “state of emergency”, the Supreme Court, stacked with loyalist judges, handed him the verdict he wanted. His questionable “election” as president on October 6 was declared valid on November 22: the judges simply dismissed the last of six petitions challenging its legality.

When the Bush administration first let it be known that it was planning a major “peace conference” between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmood Abbas, administration sources told journalists that it would be a Middle Eastern equivalent of the Dayton conference that ended the Bosnian war in 1994.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Egypt and Jordan were the poster-countries of political reform and democratisation in the Middle East. In those days, parliamentary elections like those held in Jordan last month would have been hailed as massive progress and a model for all Arab states, especially as the country’s Islamic party lost considerable ground. And even Husni Mubarak, so long the US’s main ally in the Arab world, would have been gently chided for his persecution of opposition journalists, even if his treatment of the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, Egypt’s main Islamic movement and most popular opposition party, was quietly ignored.

Western imperialists have a number of strategies that they use to impose their will on others. Brute military force is one such weapon, of course, but the language used to justify it is just as important; in fact, often more important, if the victims of imperialism can be persuaded to consent to their own exploitation. The resort to force is often a tacit admission that the moral argument has been lost.

Alan Greenspan’s recently published memoirs cut through a great deal of the official American bluster about the US involvement in Iraq, going straight to the heart of the matter. “I am saddened,” he wrote, “that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

The main factor exacerbating the situation of Pakistan and Pakistanis is the state of the local Islamic movement there. The Jama‘at-e Islami is in no position to show anyone the way out of the morass that Pakistan has become. Likewise the Ikhwan – the Jama‘at's analogue in the Arab world – are running around in circles in Egypt.

Just when prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was basking in glory after the usual praises poured on him at the end of the ruling UMNO's general assembly, he was jolted by a mammoth opposition-backed rally in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, on November 10. That tens of thousands of protesters heeded the silent invitation to join the rally calling for major reforms in the way elections are conducted, after countless threats and warnings from the prime minister and police chiefs, sends a signal that the people's resentment of the UMNO is even more than it was thought to be.