Saturday, April 22, 2006

Happy Easter to all Copts in Egypt and around the Globe

Happy Easter to all Copts, and other Orthodox Christians! Go easy on the food!

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Two blogs and an article

The Foreign Policy has started it´s own blog, called Passport, among other things gossip about who will replace Don Rumsfeld(Armitage or Lieberman), and a story about a post written by my fellow egyptian blogger the sandmonkey, called the arab blogistans.

A second blog i would like to recommend is the new blog from the people behind the safedemocracy-club de Madrid conference, on the first aniversary of the 11 March Madrid bombings. Their first debate is about how to deal with Hamas, and Shlomo Ben Ami and Yazid Sayegh is discussing the issue. It´s called madrid11.net. On the same topic,Henry Siegman has a piece in the new issue of New York Review of books, called Hamas:The last chance for peace? , check out the blogs and the article!

Ciao Berlusconi, Welcome Forza Romano!

The best news this day was the centre-left Olive coalition victory in Italy. Not the solid victory neccesary for the tough decisions needed to be taken, and implemented this comming period, but then again, when has Italy ever had governments with a strong mandate. What a cliffhanger, makes you think about Florida 2000 and Sweden 1973. Berlusconi ousted from office, a really good day, not only for democracy, but for press freedom as well!

Seymour Hersh´s new piece

This is what i´m planning on reading tomorrow, Sy Hersh new article in the New Yorker. Considering the news from Teheran today, with Ahmadinejad´s birtday gift to the Iranian people, the umma and the prophet(PBUH).

This should be recommended reading for anyone interested in the continuing saga of U.S-Iranian relations. Are we going for a rerun of the isreali show in 1979 or are we in for a walk down memory lane from March and April 2003? Hopefully none of them! The best solution would be a diplomatic solution, the only possible good solution in my view. Here is something extra from me on the Hersh article.

Monday, April 10, 2006

Arab democracy on the backburner

In today´s New York Times, Hassan M Fattah paints a bleak picture of the state of reform en route to democratization. It can´t be such a surprise really. Abd al Fatah himself uses the term controlled reform, which has really been the case from the outset. The Arab world embarked on the ship of controlled reform 30 years ago. It has always been one step forward, two steps back. The regime´s always willing to liberalize the ecomomies more than creating the environment for democratic societies. It has almost always been a charade of democracy. A good show with some of the best actors around, going from a single party system or absolute monarchires , to party plurslism or semi-authoritarianism if you will, the question is when will we see the glass as half full, rather than half empty, that is when willl we see semi-democratic states rather than semi-authoritarian ones?

If the Bush administration´s definition of democracy is regular and reoccuring elections, party pluralism and transparent ballot boxes, then there is a really good chance for "democracy" in the region, but that is pretty much what we have right now. Unfortunately the current administration don´t seem to keen on creating anything, but "democracy without democrats"

This is but one sample of qoutes gauging the level of democratization in the article.

"It feels like everything is going back to the bad old days, as if we never went through any changes at all," said Sulaiman al-Hattlan, editor in chief of Forbes Arabia and a prominent Saudi columnist and advocate. "Everyone is convinced now that there was no serious or genuine belief in change from the governments. It was just a reaction to pressure by the international media and the U.S."

Friday, April 07, 2006

Mearsheimer/Walt research paper

The controversial academic paper with the title, The Israeli lobby and U.S foreign policy(even the title might be viewed as provocative by some people), has been the focus of much debate,for instance, it prompted the distinguished Harward law professor Allan Dershowitz to write a 15000-word response.

I haven´t had the time to read it in it´s entirety yet, so i will not even try to comment on the paper for the time being. The Christian Science Monitor has a nice roundup of the debate though. For those of you, whose definition of a nice weekend dosen´t include reading a 83 page research paper, there is a slightly more digestible version at LRB.