International Politics of the Middle East

So long as Israel occupies the Golan Heights, Syria and Washington will remain adversaries, and engagement will be very difficult and limited. The question that hovers over Syria-US relations today is whether the Obama administration will turn to the Syrian peace track in the hopes of salvaging something of its Middle East policy. There seems to be no positive movement on the Palestinian peace track, so Obama may be forced to look north.

The seeming failure of America’s Palestine policy means that Damascus, while hoping for the best, will expect little. US diplomats are constantly reminding Syrian officials that it is not in their power to rescind sanctions. They invoke the strength of the pro-Israel lobby in congress as an excuse for their impotence. What is Syria to make of this? Naturally, Syrian officials are loath to do favors for Americans who claim to be able to do little in return.

The current Israeli government is even more resistant to proposals for a viable two state solution than its recalcitrant predecessors. It may bend but not break unless Obama threatens a rupture of Washington's all purpose commitment to the Jewish state. There is nothing in his performance to date that suggests he has either the necessary conviction or courage to do that.

There is no sign that he or his advisors appreciate how constrained Abbas is by the reality of Hamas' popularity eclipsing that of Fatah

Unfortunately, Michael Brenner's assessment of the situation seems accurate. My only quibble is with the implication in the article that if Obama was different things might go better. It is also possible, that the US is just in an intractable position on this. US policy is driven by Christian and Jewish fundamentalist Zionist zealots, the military-industrial complex and AIPAC. These disparate forces have controlled US Israel policy for decades now and it hard to see how Obama, regardless of what skills and inclinations he has, could do anything about that. The fact seems to be that the US is constrained to work against its self interest and against a peaceful, equitable solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by its own internal politics and there is just nothing in the foreseeable future that is going to change that.

Still less does anyone in Washington seem to understand that "Gitmo" itself was always an absurd colonial anomaly of the kind Americans used to denounce. Nor does there seem any will to undo the creation of an even more scandalous, though militarily more useful, colony in the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

Washington's instinct is to treat China as a potential partner in the domination of the world

Because Europe is divided into many different states, and no doubt because many American politicians and policy-makers find European attitudes annoying, American policy does not recognise that collectively Europe has a bigger economy than the United States and far bigger than China (even if China's growth has been spectacular).

No one questions Barack Obama's personal goodwill, still less his political intelligence. But on the basis of his first nine months in office, his commitment to a serious reassessment of the limitations of American power - let alone to an acknowledgment of the implications of the country's relative decline - is not yet clear.

the six countries’ demand for “full and unfettered access” for inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to Iran’s uranium enrichment plant near Qum

Jalili, at a Geneva press conference later, made no mention of his meeting with Burns, repeated Iran's long-standing demands to nuclear technology as its "right," and said nations that already have nuclear weapon should disarm.

Iran would ship what a U.S. official said was "most" of its approximately 3,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be further refined, to 19.75 percent purity. That is much less than the purity needed to fuel a nuclear bomb.French technicians then would fabricate it into fuel rods and return it to Tehran to power a nuclear research reactor that's used to make isotopes for nuclear medicine. Iran says the old reactor, which dates from the Shah's era, is running out of nuclear fuel.

Israel had been kept apprised of the deal.

at least 1,500 polling centers (out of 7,000) were to be located in places so insecure that no one from the IEC, the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police had ever visited them

On Election Day, these sites produced hundreds of thousands of phony Karzai votes.

The U.N. mission set up a 24-hour election center during the voting and in the early stages of the counting. My staff collected evidence on hundreds of cases of fraud around the country and, more important, gathered information on turnout in key southern provinces where few voters showed up but large numbers of votes were being reported. Eide ordered us not to share this data with anyone, including the Electoral Complaints Commission, a U.N.-backed Afghan institution legally mandated to investigate fraud. Naturally, my colleagues wondered why they had taken the risks to collect this evidence if it was not to be used.

Since my disagreements with Eide went public, Eide and his supporters have argued that the United Nations had no mandate to interfere in the Afghan electoral process. This is not technically correct. The U.N. Security Council directed the U.N. mission to support Afghanistan's electoral institutions in holding a "free, fair and transparent" vote, not a fraudulent one. And with so much at stake -- and with more than 100,000 U.S. and coalition troops deployed in the country -- the international community had an obvious interest in ensuring that Afghanistan's election did not make the situation worse.

By itself, a runoff is no antidote for Afghanistan's electoral challenges. The widespread problems that allowed for fraud in the first round of voting must be addressed. In particular, all ghost polling stations should be removed from the books ("closed" is not the right word since they never opened), and the election staff that facilitated the fraud must be replaced. Afghanistan's pro-Karzai election commission will not do this on its own. Fixing those problems will require resolve from the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan -- a quality that so far has been lacking.

In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.

The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.

The State shall ensure that its citizens enjoy equality of opportunity in regard to work, as well as a fair wage and equal remuneration for work of equal value.

Citizens have a right to live in an intellectual and cultural environment in which Arab nationalism is a source of pride,

"We have no surface water left, no rivers, no lakes - nothing whatsoever. According to the experts in the climate change, things are not looking promising either. It's actually very scary," says the Jordanian Minister for Water and Irrigation, Raed Abu Saud.

the political climate in the Middle East is making things worse.

The government says its second, even more ambitious project, could not only generate drinking water but also save the disappearing Dead Sea.

The country's main river, the River Jordan, has lost 95% of its natural flow because of diversion. Syria, Israel and Jordan have built dams along the banks of the river Jordan and its tributaries.

The government says re-distribution and desalination are the only solutions. At the heart of the country's new water strategy are two major projects that would carry water from the deep aquifers and the Red Sea in the South to the north.

The first pipeline would pump water from the Disy aquifer, which Jordan shares with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have long voiced concerns about the project, but the Jordanian government says the agreement has now been reached and that construction is due to begin within months.

"Even building those dams or not building dams, at the end of the day you have to have rain to fill the dams," says Mr Abu Saud. "When you get less water, things get more sensitive, and we have to be very careful about how we approach the subject of water with our neighbours."

The project, called the Red Dead Canal, has been hailed as an example of regional co-operation. But it is still very much of a pipe dream: getting investment for it has been a problem and there are some serious concerns about the environmental impact of mixing waters of two seas.

"Agriculture is one example of water mismanagement. It uses up 70% of our water resources, while its contribution to the economy is minimal. All of these are things that we need to rethink," says Mr Mehyar.

She described “huge gaps” between the “lofty pledges” made by states and the realities of daily life for many of their inhabitants, pointing out that “no country in the world can claim to be free of human rights violations”.

All six members of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) have been censured for laws that block female nationals from passing on their nationality to their children if the father is a foreigner.

Saudi Arabia’s record comes under particular scrutiny, with activists criticising a ban on female drivers and a system of male guardianship that sharply curtails a woman’s right to travel and control her own life.

“We’ve raised several concerns about the situation for women in the Gulf, including a report on the system of guardianship in Saudi Arabia and the problems faced by female migrant workers,

Emirati and other Gulf envoys have proven responsive to such criticism at past council meetings.

Dr Anwar Gargash, the Minister of State for Foreign and FNC Affairs, acknowledged the UAE is “not a perfect society” and listed improving conditions for women as at the top of the Government’s agenda. He said limitations on Emirati women passing on citizenship to their children should be “reviewed and debated” with the focus on liberalising such laws.

Abdul Jawad later apologised, saying producers at the TV station had tricked him into some of his accounts.

Saudi Arabia uses a strict Islamic law code. People who break the rules face punishment - lashes or imprisonment - for drinking or non-marital sex.