Posted on May 31st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Germany’s conservative opposition on Monday nominated Angela Merkel, a Protestant minister’s daughter from the formerly communist east, as its challenger to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, giving her the chance to become the country’s first female leader.
Merkel, 50, emerged as favorite to challenge Schroeder after the chancellor called for national elections to […]
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Posted on May 31st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Dinara Asanbaeva, academic supervisor at a political science academy sponsored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the arrangement also made her doubt both men’s commitment to democracy.
“These leaders are just trying to divide up the benefits of the revolution between themselves,” she said. “It’s a change of the political elite but […]
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Filed under: Uncategorized
Posted on May 31st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
U.S. senators said yesterday that the Uzbek government’s harsh response to an uprising will affect relations with Washington, adding their voices to calls for the Central Asian nation’s leadership to allow an international investigation into the bloodshed.
The visit by Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John E. Sununu […]
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Posted on May 31st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
US troops outraged Iraq’s new government yesterday by arresting one of the country’s foremost Sunni leaders only to release him later and call the whole episode a mistake.
Firing stun grenades, American soldiers burst into the home of Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, head of the largest Sunni Arab political party, shortly after dawn. They forced a hood over […]
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Posted on May 31st, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Insurgents determined to flout an Iraqi-led security offensive in Baghdad put on a bloody show of defiance with a dual suicide attack which left up to 30 people dead and more than 100 injured.
The attacks, carried out in the predominantly Shia town of Hillah, south of Baghdad, came on the second day of Operation Lightning, […]
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Posted on May 30th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
There is a strange disconnect in America at the moment, with the press partly to blame but in the position to do something about it, or at least explain it. You may be surprised to learn that nearly 6 in 10 Americans feel the Iraq war is “not worth it,” according to a recent Gallup […]
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Posted on May 30th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
The U.S. Justice Department is expected to file indictments against two former senior American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) staffers - Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman - and, according to sources familiar with the affair, the charges will be subsumed under the Espionage Act.
A Virginia grand jury is now examining the evidence in the […]
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Posted on May 30th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
France has resoundingly rejected the proposed European Union constitution, plunging the EU into crisis and French politics into confusion.
The result of the referendum was a massive 56 per cent for the “no”, against 44 per cent for the “yes”, according to Dominique de Villepin, the Interior Minister. An unusually high turnout of 70 per […]
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Posted on May 30th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation’s service. There are many stories as to its actual beginnings, with over two dozen cities and towns laying claim to being the birthplace of Memorial Day. There is also evidence that organized women’s groups in the […]
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Filed under: miscellaneous
Posted on May 27th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Today’s New York Times (print edition) has a full-page advertisement on page 5 from the Council for the National Interest Foundation headlined:
AIPAC’s Agenda is Not America’s
The ad is well-done and makes excellent points, including: ISRAEL, STOP SPYING ON AMERICA! I cannot remember an explicit anti-AIPAC ad ever running in a mainstream paper.
The ad is signed […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 27th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
In 1994 Orthodox bishops from the various jurisdictions gathered in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and agreed to work toward a united church. One approach is for each to be granted independence from its “mother church;” independent bodies can then combine into a united American church. It’s a prospect that has enthusiastic support among American Orthodox of all […]
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Filed under: religion
Posted on May 26th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
The House of Representatives voted down a measure, by a 128 to 300 vote, that called on President Bush to devise a plan for a withdrawal from Iraq. It came in the form of an amendment to the $491 billion budget for the Pentagon that was passed on Wednesday night.
But the withdrawal amendment marks the […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 20th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Many evangelicals say they’re just trying to satisfy demands not met by traditional churches. Craig Groeschel, who launched Life Church in Edmond, Okla., in 1996, started out doing market research with non-churchgoers in the area — and got an earful. “They said churches were full of hypocrites and were boring,” he recalls. So he designed […]
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Posted on May 20th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Rhetorically, the United States government is committed to spreading “freedom” throughout the globe; in practice, however, the interests of the U.S. state are in direct and often deadly conflict with the radical libertarian rhetoric – never more so than today. Uzbekistan is a textbook example. A free-market revolution against a murderous neo-Communist dictator is going […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 19th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
The Washington-Tashkent “special relationship” started as early as the mid-1990s, during the Bill Clinton administration. In 1999, Green Berets were actively training Uzbek Special Forces. Khanabad has nothing to do with Afghanistan: Bagram takes care of this. But Khanabad is crucial as one of the key bases surrounding Bush’s Greater Middle East, or to put […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 18th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Meanwhile, the property rights of thousands of enterprises are in limbo. In Kiev, rumors abound that oligarchs connected to the old regime are trying to sell their enterprises to Russian business executives and are preparing to escape the country. Naturally, executives are cutting off investment, and economic growth is screeching to a halt.
To make matters […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 18th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
One can be critical of the Crusades, but primarily because of the great damage they have inflicted on the Christian East. As for the slaughters, what the Crusaders did to the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099 was as bad as what the Muslims had done to countless Christian cities before and after that time. […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 18th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
As Karimov clamped down at home, the strategic importance of the Karshi-Khanabad base, the cornerstone of the US-Uzbek alliance, was dramatically declining. Today, many of the functions performed by the base could be easily shifted to Afghanistan. Indeed, Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants permanent US military bases in Afghanistan and the Pentagon is spending US […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 18th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday the United States is pressing for facts in the political unrest in Uzbekistan late last week that may have left hundreds of people dead. She says the Bush administration has been a persistent critic of President Islam Karimov’s human rights record despite cooperation on anti-terrorism issues.
The […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 18th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
This account sharply contradicts the claim of Uzbekistan’s prosecutor general, made yesterday, that not one civilian had been killed. Rashid Kadyrov said that 169 had died, all “terrorists”, apart from 30 soldiers, three women and two children who were among hostages killed by the rebels.
The developments came after Condoleeza Rice, the US Secretary of […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 17th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Refugees who fled from the massacre committed by Uzbek security forces agreed on one thing yesterday: the number of dead is not 500 - the most common reported figure - but could be in the thousands.
As reports continued to come in of clashes spreading outside the town of Andizhan, a sergeant in charge of the […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 14th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
If we receive the heterodox in order to impart to them the witness of our faith and tradition, this is holy. If we host them in order to express to them our respect and our freedom, this is noble. If, however, we extend an invitation to them in order to divvy up and pass around […]
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Filed under: religion
Posted on May 14th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Thousands of terrified Uzbeks fled for the border Saturday but hundreds angrily returned to the square where police fired on demonstrators to put down an uprising against country’s authoritarian U.S.-allied leader. A human rights monitor said about 200 people were killed.
Protesters overran government buildings Saturday in an Uzbek village on the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border, torching police […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 13th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Still, we can recognize crimes as crimes, which brings me back to Roosevelt. Why are Americans still treating this monster as a hero?
I hardly know where to start. His contempt for the U.S. Constitution he was sworn to defend, in everything from creating a national welfare state to putting U.S. citizens in concentration camps, […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on May 13th, 2005 by Daniel Larison
Bashing George W. Bush has been the thinking person’s sport for four years now. Foreign policy intellectuals play their own version of the game: bashing neoconservatives. This is Bush-bashing with a Ph.D. It has proven surprisingly popular, attracting onto the field not only liberals but also some traditional conservatives and many conspiracy theorists, for whom […]
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