Articles

Malaysia’s United Malay National Organisation (UMNO) held its general assembly last month. It was the first such gathering for the ruling party since Abdullah Ahmad Badawi took over the helm in October 2003. But as usual there were no elections for the president’s and deputy president’s posts

Attacks against foreign occupation forces in Afghanistan have escalated both in frequency and intensity to a point where large parts of the country are in a state of total insurrection and lawlessness. According to NATO, as of mid-November there were 97 suicide attacks this year that killed 217 people.

At the very time China was engulfed in a trade dispute with the US and the European Union – centred on the large imbalance between China’s vast exports to those countries and its imports from them – Beijing has unveiled a programme to multiply its already strong economic ties with African countries, and to establish "strategic links" with them.

Pakistan appears headed for more turbulent times as General Pervez Musharraf runs out of policy options in his desperate attempts to appease his foreign masters. Internally, bush fires are burning in three of the four provinces; in the fourth—the Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province—Musharraf is fighting a rearguard action to outflank supporters of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whom he replaced in a coup in October 1999. At the international level, foreign leaders are no longer as polite as they were immediately after September 2001, when Musharraf hitched his fortunes to America’s “war on terrorism”

Ethiopia – which already has thousands of troops in Somalia, ostensibly to protect the tiny and powerless transitional government – appears about to launch full-scale war against the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which controls most of the war-torn country, including the capital, Mogadishu, and is trying to restore Somali unity. It is in Ethiopia's strategic interest that Somalia continues to be a failed state nominally managed by a weak government that is controlled by it and its allies through the UN.

Even before the midterm elections in the US last month, many Republicans had recognised that their president had become a liability rather than an asset, and had requested that he stay away from their pre-election campaigns. The perception that the mood in America had turned against Bush and the neo-conservatives was confirmed when the elections’ results came in: the Democrats took control of the House of Congress for the first time in 12 years, and gained enough seats in the Senate to match the Republicans, with 409 seats each; two seats were won by independent candidates allied with the Democrats, giving them control of the Senate

My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III with Malcolm McConnell. Pub: Simon & Schuster, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, 2006. Pp: 417. Hbk: $27.00.

If anyone needed evidence that the deepening political crisis in Lebanon has entered an unpredictable phase, the government of Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora provided it on November 25. Siniora defied warnings from the opposition and other leading politicians and high-ranking officials, including president Emile Lahoud, and called for a cabinet meeting that approved a draft United Nations document for an international tribunal to try suspects in the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, who was killed in a massive truck-bomb on February 14, 2005 in Beirut.

In Iraq, tens of people are dying every day as a result of Iraqi resistance operations against US, British and Iraqi government forces, operations against resistance groups, and fighting between militias representing various political factions (most of them sectarian). No one doubts that the US has failed utterly in its agenda there, and that the country is in chaos.

Every US president enters the twilight zone of his presidency with trepidation. Given the enormous power and prestige of this office, seeing it slip from one’s grasp must be a particularly painful experience. For George Bush it is even worse, as he has presided over a series of disasters regarded as largely of his own making.