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It looks like a double standard, and probably it is, but why is it that when I see obese Americans munching on Coke and giant hot dogs and chanting ‘USA, USA’, it sounds like the worst kind of chauvinism as well as unsportsmanlike conduct, and when I hear the Greeks cheering lustily ‘Hellas, Hellas’, it […]
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The harmful ambiguity of U.S. policy on Chechnya needs to be ended immediately. It compromizes the “war against terror,” jeopardizes national security, and gains nothing at all—least of all any brownie points for the U.S. in the Muslim world. It is high time for the U.S. government to accept that people like [Chechen president’] Maskhadov, […]
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As war is one of the heaviest of national evils, a calamity in which every species of misery is involved; as it sets the general safety to hazard, suspends commerce, and desolates the country; as it exposes great numbers to hardships, dangers, captivity and death; no man who desires the public prosperity will inflame general […]
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Further sign of its American allegiances came on Friday, when Georgia announced that 50 of its specialized mountain infantry soldiers will be deployed to Afghanistan, following two weeks of training in Germany.
These developments seem all the more mystifying in that they have been provoked almost entirely by the Georgian side. If Saakashvili intends to realize […]
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Democracy is incapable of provoking a ferocious civil war, but prerevolutionary violence, persistent major disorder, and refusal to enforce the law, if carried far enough, can do so.~ Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Civil War, The Soviet Union and Communism
As I was finishing Prof. Payne’s excellent new history of the Spanish Civil War (there is […]
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Unlike Augustine, however, Aquinas lived within a recognizably Christian social order and, for that reason, approached the question of citizenship from a different angle. Whereas Augustine spoke of the theological foundations of citizenship, Aquinas, following Aristotle, thought of citizenship as a natural aspect of human life. Aquinas considered politics to be inescapable because, like […]
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The head of Belgrade’s Kosovo Coordination Centre warned today that Albanian extremists in Kosovo are preparing for a major armed operation.~ B92, Yugoslavia, August 24, 2004
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War with Russia is close and it is necessary to prepare the people of Georgia for such an eventuality, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili warned in a newspaper interview published in France on Tuesday.
“We are very close to a war [with Russia], the population must be prepared,” he told the French-language Liberation daily newspaper.
Denouncing military aid […]
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Sadr’s condemnation of the interim Prime Minster Iyad Allawi and his dismissal of the June “handover of power” as a farce is justified. Nor has Allawi’s heavy-handed, compliant rule gone down well with most of the Iraqi population - a recent poll showed his approval rating at just 2 per cent, tied with Saddam Hussein.
Nor […]
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US planes pounded Najaf’s cemetery and historic centre near the Imam Ali shrine, dimming hopes of a peaceful end to a near three-week stand-off between US-led Iraqi forces and Shiite militia.
As US military officials said it could take up to 10 years to crush the insurgency, nine people, including a Turk, were killed in a […]
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Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an unfortunate propaganda piece from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (sorry, no link), which predictably paints the South Ossetians as a band of criminals and the villains of the piece. In this frankly dishonest portrayal of events, Mr. Saakashvili understandably cast all of the blame for the recent outbreak in violence […]
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Some men have suggested that sovereignty resides in the people. This is a general or abstract proposition, [and] when one wants to apply it to history, or in history, one finds that the people have never been and never can be sovereign: for where would the subjects be if the people were sovereign? […]
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Now a government is secure insofar as it has God for its foundation and His Will for its guide; but this, surely, is not a description of Liberal government. It is, in the Liberal view, the people who rule, and not God; God Himself is a “constitutional monarch” Whose authority has been totally delegated […]
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More than half of Americans, 54 percent, continue to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or a program to develop them before the United States invaded last year, according to a poll released Friday.
Evidence of such weapons has not been found.
Half believe Iraq was either closely linked with al-Qaida before the war (35 percent) […]
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President Mikhail Saakashvili said his forces seized strategic heights after fighting in the rebel South Ossetia region Thursday and promised more such victories to fulfill a pledge to reunite his country.
Hours later, Saakashvili said his troops would hand over the heights above South Ossetia’s regional capital of Tskhinvali to peacekeepers and pull back in what […]
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Shi’ite fighters appeared still to be in control of a holy shrine in Najaf on Friday after Iraq’s interim government said it had overcome a bloody uprising by seizing the Imam Ali mosque without a shot being fired.
Witnesses in the southern city said Mehdi Army militiamen loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr controlled the […]
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Saudi Arabia had no women in its Olympic delegation, but it just might at the Beijing Olympics if the political process struggling to take root in Iraq spreads there–or to Syria, Yemen or Jordan. And if the notion of an Arab constitutional democracy makes your eyes roll, as it does for William Odom and Francis […]
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But the general approach of the paleos is burdened by one major negative trait and several bad habits. The first is their fear of and antipathy to clear political principles, to the very concept of politically relevant, universal objective truth. What is – or, rather, should conservatism be all about? About conserving the truth – […]
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The second point is, quite naturally, that identity formation grows within a CONTEXT. If you do not understand the social, economic, cultural and political underpinnings of a society, you cannot understand either its corporate or individual identities, affiliations or loyalties. Anyone who tries to pinpoint an Iraqi in terms of a static rubric (Sunni/ Shi’i/ […]
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Note that the Pakistani government had never before revealed Khan’s name. It had never been mentioned in any Pakistani newspaper or any Pakistani news conference. Since Khan had been turned, he was perhaps the most valuable asset inside al-Qaeda Pakistani intelligence ever had.
Why would this Pakistani official now tell Rohde the name, if that is […]
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The radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr appeared last night to have accepted an ultimatum by the Iraqi government to end his insurgency and disarm his Mahdi army militia.
But confusion surrounded his terms for acceptance and there were indications that his offer may have come too late to stave off a military assault on the sacred Imam […]
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Russia, the backer of the separatists and their potential protector in war, has been presenting an array of mixed signals for [Georgian President] Saakashvili to interpret, meeting warmly with the Georgians at the top level while members of the Russian Parliament and military officers have made inflammatory remarks.
Mr. Saakashvili said that Russia’s position would be […]
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I think Bush and Blair have got a great deal wrong in the way they have handled Iraq since the war. But that should not obscure the fact that we went into Iraq for the right reasons. Iraq was not entitled to all the protection of a normal sovereign state. It had invaded its neighbours, […]
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About 140 Rwandan soldiers arrived in Sudan’s Darfur province yesterday, becoming the first foreign army deployed in the Iraq-sized region since Arab militiamen began attacking black African farmers 17 months ago.
But their arrival sparked immediate conflict, with Rwanda declaring the troops would use force if necessary and Sudan responding such action would not be tolerated. […]
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Empire, says British historian Niall Ferguson in the journal Foreign Policy, is a good thing. Empire building is the right and moral thing to do.
“Anyone who dislikes U.S. hegemony should bear in mind that, rather than a multipolar world of competing great powers, a world with no hegemon at all may be the […]
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