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A year or so ago, it was still possible to avoid the worst in Iraq. It made sense for the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, and use its leverage to encourage Iraqi political rivals to seek an accommodation as the alternative to a bloody civil war that might have either lasted indefinitely or produced what would have amounted to an oppressive re-Baathification of the country. It is still likely even now that if the American and British forces leave Iraq over a period of some months one of these two alternatives will shape the future of the country. But with each passing month and regional conflagration the more positive outcome of accommodation becomes less likely, civil war has already become a fact of life in Iraq, and a wider regional conflagration can happen at any time. If this is so, Iraq probably faces a long violent political...

November marked the 50th anniversary of the Suez crisis, when Britain, France and Israel decided to attack Egypt and unseat Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the nationalist Egyptian leader. This was one of those seminal moments in the mid-twentieth century that had momentous geopolitical consequences for the world, and especially for the Middle East. When the West first promised and then reneged on its promise to help the construction of the Aswan Dam, Abdel-Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal to use its revenue to build the dam, as was within his right. As the result of the strategic importance of the canal to Western interests, Britain, France and Israel decided to remove the Egyptian leader and undo the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, as they had done only three years previously when Dr Mohammad Mosaddeq had nationalised Iranian oil and was toppled as the result of a British-CIA coup. In 1875, Isma’il Pasha had...

Interview with Daoud Nassar,Tent of Nations, Bethlehem, Palestine Daoud Nassar is the owner of 100 acres of land nine kilometers southwest of Bethlehem. This land has been in the Nassar family since 1916 – family members used to the live in caves there – and it has been cultivated for olives, grapes and wheat. Nevertheless, in 1991 the Israeli military declared the land to be Israeli state property. The Nassar family was able to challenge Israel in the courts as fortunately they were in possession of all the original land ownership papers dating back to the Ottoman period. In 2001, although the legal case remained unresolved, the local council of Israeli settlements decided to build a road on the eastern side of the Nassar land. Then in 2002 the same council took the decision to build another road on the Nassar property, this time along the western side. It took...

LONDON – Two hours drive due north from here lies the Artic Circle. But in this town of 120, 000 people one not only feels the bitter cold but also the white heat of the technological revolution. Here are the principal research and development offices of Nokia. There are 800 other high tech companies, some overflowing their expertise into neighboring Russia where they see the future “beckoning”, in the words of Pertti Huuskonen, the boss of Technopolis, which is just building a big facility close to St Petersburg airport. There are probably more PhDs per square metre in this compact old paper-milling town than anywhere else on earth. This astonishing intellectual creation can be laid at the feet of the Finnish educational system, considered by all who survey it, including the OECD, as possessing the best school system in the world. Finland is also reckoned to be in the top...

LONDON – Will the Finnish presidency of the European Union end with a bang or a whimper? No one is laying bets here, but much is at stake – the continuation of negotiations on Turkey’s future entry and the future relationship of the EU to Russia, for which the Finns have more historical experience to draw on than anyone else. Both issues are coming to a head in the next few weeks – Russia when President Vladimir Putin has his formal summit with European heads of government in Helsinki on November 24th and the EU summit in mid December when the clock will stop for the Turkish decision. Talking with Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, current president of the European Union, at his pleasant, unguarded, official residence overlooking a wintry lake in central Helsinki, it is apparent that Turkey has to realize that the longer it draws out the compromises that...

Interview with Prof. Dr. Muhammad Machasin, former Director of Graduate Studies at the Islamic State University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, on the subject of “civil Islam”. On the occasion of the globethics.net1 conference on “Ethics and Fundamentalism”, held in Huissen, Netherlands, 27-31 August 2006, I spoke to the former director of Graduate Studies at the Islamic State University, Prof. Muhammad Machasin, about his ideas on “civil Islam”. Prof. Machasin is the acting head of consultative leadership of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He is also an author and teacher on Islam and fundamentalism. His publications include:1. The Concept of Human Being in Islam, paper presented in the International Conference on Islam and Humanism, IAIN Walisongo Semarang, November 5-8, 2001.2. Faith and Identity, paper presented in “Consultation on Christian-Muslim Dialogue” held by The Lutheran World Federation and Protestant University Duta Wacana, Yogyakarta, April 4-6, 2002.3. Democracy and Shari’a in Islamic Doctrine and...

The timing of the death sentence imposed on Saddam Hussein, so suspiciously convenient for Republican aspirations in the mid-term elections, will only deepen the sectarian tensions in Iraq, fanning further the flames of civil war. While President Bush predictably greeted the news as yet another ‘milestone’ in the effort of the Iraqi people ‘to replace the rule of the tyrant with the rule of law,’ a less partisan reaction would lament the timing as intensifying sectarian strife in Iraq that has by now become a civil war intertwined with a war of resistance. The American stage-managing of this judicial process in Baghdad has been evident to close observers all along. It always seemed legally dubious to initiate a criminal trial against Saddam Hussein while the American occupation was encountering such strong resistance by Saddam loyalists, especially as the US-led invasion was widely regarded throughout the world as itself embodying the...

LONDON – Can one imagine when (and if) Daniel Ortega Saavedra and his ex-revolutionary Sandinistas are swept back into office in next Sunday’s general election the late U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, saying calmly from his grave, “Here we go again”, and then, after a thoughtful pause, “So what?” It was Mr Reagan, after all, who said of the Sandinista regime, “If we ignore it will spread and become a mortal threat to the entire New World”. The Sandinistas were “just two days drive from Harlingen, Texas” and, as Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, added,“Defending the mainland ranks above all other priorities.” Rhetoric like this cost Central America- there were also left/right civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras- hundreds of thousands of lives and left villages and towns decimated. They were unnecessary wars and the U.S. had no business supporting a small, unyielding, land-owning class against a small minority...

LONDON – It was the rebelling colonial subjects of Britain in America who, in their Declaration of Independence in 1776, first synthesized the best ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers of Europe. And they did that in the most inspiring prose that makes the subsequent French document of thirteen years later, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, look like a shopping list. The Americans invented the modern liberal republic. It was the Americans who took a brilliant idea, two and half thousand years old, which had briefly flourished but then faded away, and reintroduced it to the modern world – democracy. It was America that inspired the French Revolution, although as has often happened since, as Napoleon rampaged all over Europe, it came to regret what it had provoked. As one who spent a portion of his youth working on Martin Luther King’s staff during his campaign against the slums...

LONDON – The saddle on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has more than slipped. It has become undone. For America to carry the world on this issue it has to become convincing. It has to demonstrate that what it is asking others to do it is also doing itself. Public opinion in Europe certainly, but also in much of the rest of the world, seems to have an intuitive understanding that: a) war over alleged nuclear weapons’ capability is hyprocrytical whilst the U.S. (and Britain and France) is so over-armed; b) is doubly hypocritical given the West’s long tolerance (only relatively recently curtailed) of exporting the ingredients for making weapons of mass destruction; c) is triply hypocritical given the blind eye it turned to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds and Israel’s manufacture of a large nuclear arsenal. There is also a further point, perhaps too sophisticated...

LONDON – The atmospherics in Scotland around this week’s meeting of the main protagonists in Northern Ireland’s long civil war have been good. The IRA has given up the gun. The fundamentalist preacher and leader of hard line Protestant opinion, the Rev Ian Paisley, is prepared to sit down not just with the prime minister of Ireland, Berty Ahern, and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain but also with Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader (and the person in the IRA leadership who counts the most). Scotland, with its long history of autonomy on legal matters (remember the Lockerbie air terrorism trial), its independent educational system (no wonder Scots dominate the Blair administration) and, most recently, an autonomous parliament with real power is a lesson in political devolution for all who fear it, whether it be in Belfast, Madrid, Kosovo, Tel Aviv or New Delhi. Just about everything, other that...

LONDON – It was the late president of France, Charles de Gaulle, who famously said, “Brazil has a great future, and it always will have.” With the first round of the Brazilian election over with the favourite to win, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, coming under increasing scrutiny for corruption – the seemingly eternal Brazilian political disease – many observers seriously wonder if Brazil can ever unlock its enormous potential. Brazil has long lived out its personal fantasy of the archetypal relaxed, tolerant and gregarious country with Copacabana beach, the samba, the carnival and a great deal of sexual freedom, but all this has come at a price – the lack of discipline in both personal and public morality. The ingrained privileges of those who have already made it, together with the manipulative corruption of the established political class, make it difficult for Brazil to engage in the economic...