Turkey Turns Away from Europe, Toward the Shanghai Cooperation Organization - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Erdogan threw the diplomatic equivalent of a cream pie during a late-night television interview last Friday. Understandably, he was expressing frustration at stalled negotiations over Turkey’s accession to the European Union. Incomprehensibly, he suggested that Turkey join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization instead.
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Turkish columnists are now debating whether Erdogan is serious about wanting to play in a different league or bluffing in an attempt to force Brussels into serious negotiations. Or he is kicking up a cloud of dust to distract the public from weightier issues like Kurdish rights or lower economic growth? He has been known to propose out of the blue policies that appeal to his conservative base — banning abortion, restoring capital punishment — but that he has little intention of seeing into law.
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When the EDAM pollsters asked foreign policy experts the same question they’d put to ordinary Turks, almost 87 percent answered that Turkey’s future lay with Europe
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Israeli jets said to have struck alleged weapons convoy in Syria | The Back Channel - 0 views
A Timbuktu Test For Europe - Bloomberg - 0 views
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The first thing to note is that Mali’s problems, and those of the wider Sahel -- countries on the belt of land that runs along the southern edge of the Sahara -- are not new. There was no lack of intelligence about them. In September 2011, the European Union prepared a detailed strategy paper on the region, with recommendations of what to do and how to tackle the issue of the Sahel becoming an empty space free for jihadists to roam. The U.S. also has been deeply involved there for more than a decade, training soldiers for counterinsurgency operations and closely monitoring the situation on the ground.
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On Malian television, local interviewees say it is right that France should help Mali in its hour of need, because Malian soldiers of the legendary Tirailleurs Senegalais regiment died for France, including in the two world wars.
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it is likely, failing a quick victory, that the rest of Europe will soon face a choice: either support the French and the Malians with real resources, or concede defeat in an area where Europe's interests, including its energy supplies, are directly threatened.
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An open letter to the New York Times concerning Thomas Friedman | Daniel W. Drezner - 1 views
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Why not "negotiate with the Iranian people?" Well, to get technical about it, they're not the ones controlling Iran's nuclear program. That's not a minor issue. For all this talk about how states are irrelevant in the 21st century, on matters of hard security not much has changed. Lest Friedman or anyone else doubt this, recall that the Iranian state has proven itself more than capable of suppressing the Iranian people over the past four years.
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Iranians take nationalist pride in the technological accomplishments of their national nuclear program. Furthermore, in a propaganda war between the U.S. government and their own government, the U.S. is probably gonna lose even if it possesses the better argument. For all of Friedman's loose talk about the power of social media in a digitized world, he elides the point that one of the sentiments that social media is best at magnifying is nationalism
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Friedman's "break all the rules" strategy is as transgressive as those dumb-ass Dr. Pepper commercials. Worse, he's recommending a policy that would actually be counter-productive to any hope of reaching a deal with Iran.
How Washington helped foster the Islamist uprising in Mali -- New Internationalist - 3 views
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Libya was the catalyst for the Azawad rebellion, not its underlying cause. Rather, the catastrophe now being played out in Mali is the inevitable outcome of the way in which the Global War On Terror has been inserted into the Sahara-Sahel by the US, in concert with Algerian intelligence operatives, since 2002.
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The 9/11 terrorist attacks precipitated a whole new era in US-Algerian relations. Over the next four years, Bush and Bouteflika met six more times to develop a largely covert and highly duplicitous alliance.
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By 1998, the killing had become so bad that many Islamists abandoned the GIA to form the Groupe Salafiste pour le Prédication et le combat (GSPC) but it soon became evident that it too had been infiltrated by the DRS. Although the ‘Dirty War’ began winding down after 1998, it has never really ended. The GSPC, which changed its name to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in 2006, is still operative both in northern Algeria and the Sahara-Sahel.
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