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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia

Zakharova: BRICS expansion reflects the world's struggle against the neocolonial oppression of the West

2024-09-04

Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. [Regnum] The expansion of BRICS speaks of the determination of the world community to throw off the neocolonial yoke of the West. This was stated on September 3 by the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova. This is how she commented on the words of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about the “potential danger” of the fact that the number of BRICS member states has doubled. “The doubling of the number of BRICS member countries indicates the determination of the world community to throw off the yoke of neocolonial oppression, develop in accordance with its national interests, preserve the traditions of civilization and not allow the destructive influence of Western liberal dictatorship,” Zakharova wrote on her Telegram channel. The diplomat added that London should first and foremost beware of the technological degradation in Britain caused by liberal decadence. As reported by the Regnum news agency, Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov reported that Russia has invited 36 foreign leaders to the BRICS summit, which will take place from October 22 to 24 in Kazan. He specified that 18 of them have already confirmed their participation. Since January 1 of this year, Russia has been chairing BRICS. Since 2010, the association included Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. Since the beginning of this year, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia have joined the association. On July 28, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim announced that the country had formally declared its desire to join BRICS in a letter to Russia. Azerbaijan applied to join in August. At the end of July, the executive director of the National Committee for BRICS Research, Georgy Toloraya, noted that about 30 states intend to join the interstate association.

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-Short Attention Span Theater-

"We" Aren't Responsible for World's Problems: Time to Recognize Limits of West's Influence

2016-05-09

[Huffpoo's World Post] What do you do after you brought your party’s control of government to a dramatic end? You become an international scold and blowhard, blaming the world’s problems on everyone else--who have no ability to solve any of them. In fact, has-beens and once-weres often are brought in as decorations for international gatherings, meant to add gravitas to the proceedings. A few years back I shared an elevator with former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who was speaking at Qatar’s Doha Forum. He said nothing of note either in private or public, but exuded the air of a man who still mattered. It turns out he’s the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, which must be as superfluous a position as exists. People recognized the importance of schooling long before there was a UN. And there’s not much the global organization can do for a service that can only be delivered locally. Indeed, in poor countries schools tend to get worse the more the national government is involved. Inexpensive private schools often are the only hope for the most disadvantaged and marginalized people in the most impoverished and oppressed nations. However, Brown unburdened himself in the Huffington Post, and the subject wasn’t education. Rather, he said we all are responsible for the depredations of Nigeria’s murderous Boko Haram. Really. "The World Should Be Ashamed of the Failure to #BringBackOurGirls," he titled his article. It’s been more than two years since the group--which has attributes of both insurgency and terrorism--kidnapped 276 girls from the town of Chibok. Boko Haram is an Islamist-jihadist group; its name roughly means "Western education is forbidden." The militants kill moderate Muslims but typically target Christians, as in Chibok. They usually slaughter male students, but often capture girls for sex slaves, child wives, and suicide bombers. Despite promises from the Nigerian government, proffers of Western assistance, and a twitter campaign led by First Lady Michelle Obama, none of the girls have been rescued.

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Syria-Lebanon-Iran

Breaking: Iran's 'Fordow' Nuke Plant Now Fully Operational

2012-02-13

According to Mehr News Agency, sources within Iran revealed that there will be an announcement in a few days that the previously secret nuclear site, the Fordow nuclear enrichment facility, is now fully operational and enriching uranium at a 20% level. The world learned about the existence of this site in 2009 when the Iranians disclosed it to the IAEA right before President Obama, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France made statements at the G-20 summit in Pittsburg that referenced the secret Iranian site. The site is built deep into a mountain on a Revolutionary Guards' base near the city of Qom. The Iranian leaders had intended to transfer much of their low-enriched uranium stock from Natanz to Fordow and to start the process of enrichment at a much higher level with protection against any attack. It is reported that the site cannot be destroyed even with the current bunker-buster bombs kept in the U.S. military's arsenal. It should be noted that the Fordow facility can only house 3,000 centrifuges, and is therefore useless for providing fuel for a nuclear power plant. The only purpose is for clandestine use or for making a nuclear bomb. It is also important to note that enriching uranium to the 20% level is 9/10 of the way to weaponization.

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Britain

A View From London: Preventing the Next Mumbai

2010-10-06

It is almost two years since terrorists from Lashkar-e-Taiba traveled to Mumbai, India, and carried out a string of attacks on hotels, cafes, a Jewish center and other civilian targets. The horrific footage of those attacks spread around the world and raised obvious questions: Would it happen again -- and if so, where? In the past week that question appears to have been answered. Increasingly credible reports have emerged claiming that Predator drone attacks in Pakistan have killed a number of people planning Mumbai-style attacks in Western European cities. This fits with the increased number of alerts and heightened threat levels across Europe in recent weeks. Last weekend the British Foreign Office changed its threat level to "high" from "general." And there is another element of the story that suggests its authenticity: Two British citizens are among those reportedly killed in the Pakistan drone strikes, along with several German nationals. Lashkar-e-Taiba certainly has links to the United Kingdom, the Western center of jihad. A comprehensive report published in July by the Centre for Social Cohesion, "Islamist Terrorism: the British Connections," revealed that 5% of the Islamists convicted of terrorism-related offenses in Britain over the past 10 years have links to the group. What is striking is the ambition of the plots they have been involved with. Shehzad Tanweer, one of the suicide bombers who attacked the London transport system in July 2005, was associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba. So were British-born Omar Sheikh, convicted in a Pakistani court for his role in the killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and Rashid Rauf, the suspected ringleader of the 2006 trans-Atlantic airline plot (himself reportedly killed in a missile strike in Pakistan two years ago). A further five men with links to Lashkar-e-Taiba have been convicted of terrorism-related crimes in the U.K. They include Dhiren Barot, the head of a U.K.-based terror cell that planned a series of attacks against major targets including financial buildings, and Omar Khyam, whose parents clearly were poetry lovers... convicted in 2007 for heading a cell that aimed to use fertilizer bombs to attack targets including a shopping center in Kent and a nightclub in London. It is also significant that once again the source of this latest plan appears to have been Pakistan. In 2008, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown said three-quarters of the serious terror plots being aimed at Britain originated in Pakistan. The head of MI5 said last month that this figure now stands at 50%, but this reflects the troubling rise in activity in Somalia and Yemen, not a decreased threat from Pakistan. Pakistan's ability to export security problems around the world -- as the Times Square car bomb reminded us -- continues to grow. The man who placed that bomb set the timing device at "7:00," but it was a 24-hour timer that should have been set at 19:00 hours (which was when he wanted it to blow). Only that mistake stopped the killing and wounding of countless people. This is why MBAs are management, and not labour. One really doesn't want someone with that lack of attention to detail putting together one's car, or one's toothpaste. The United States has, like the U.K. and Europe, been exceptionally lucky in avoiding recent attacks. But the paucity of recent attacks on Western cities has also been the product of exceptional work by our intelligence and security agencies. Hear, hear! As events in Pakistan remind us, our forces have repeatedly proved highly capable at infiltrating and eavesdropping, often allowing them to kill the terrorists before they can kill us. This is good and important work. But it must not make us think that we can always be entirely free from risk. Announcements from American and British authorities are of questionable usefulness. I disagree. When Mr. Wife travels abroad, I feel better knowing that he knows what situations to be aware of. Telling tourists in Europe to be wary of public places may actually play into the terrorist game plan better than anything else. What are such tourists meant to do? Stay in their hotels? Not travel in the first place? Being wary means being ready to recognize the problem and act to fix it, or at least to get out of the way while others do. A pack, not a herd, and all that. Islamist groups aspire to carry out attacks like those in Mumbai precisely in order to trigger such fear. Civilian targets are attractive to terrorists because they are weak targets, with generally poor security unable to fight off attackers armed (like those in Mumbai) with rifles and grenades. The policemen in Mumbai didn't have bullets for their guns, and their range time could be measured in single-digit days over their entire career. It's a bit different in Europe and America. Yes, the jihadis will kill some people, should they pull off an attack; but they won't be able to run free for four days like they did in Mumbai. Civilians on cell phones will take care of locating the problems, I should think. But there is another reason that weak civilian targets constitute such an attraction: They produce terror in its purest form. Even leaving aside any devastation caused by the attacks themselves, any Mumbai-style assault in a city such as Paris or London could have an effect on the way in which the public approaches day-to-day life. Or not. London seems to have recovered from the subway attack pretty well. In 1996, the Provisional IRA exploded a bomb in the heart of Canary Wharf, London's financial district. The explosion killed two people and wounded dozens, but the financial cost came to an estimated $135 million. It requires very little money to pack a truck full of fertilizer and place it in a civilian area. And as the IRA famously said after attempting to wipe out the British cabinet in 1984, the terrorists only have to be lucky once, while we have to be lucky all the time. And vice versa, when it's our guys who're doing the hunting, which they've been doing quite successfully lately. That's why the smart jihadis have moved to the soft jihad of the law -- it's less risky. One of the most common taunts of Islamists is, "We love death more than you love life." At some point they will find another opportunity to demonstrate this. In the meantime, if death is so attractive, then we should do what we can to bring it to them. DOUGLAS MURRAY is director of the London-based Centre for Social Cohesion. President Obama was correct, if tactless, when he said we can absorb a hit if we have to. After all, we have before, mourned our dead, and taken the battle to the enemy's strongholds. That's not what will defeat us. Only submission to the desires of Caliphatists for special treatment will defeat us.

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Britain

Brown named 3rd worst UK premier

2010-08-04

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been voted as the third worst premier in UK history since the Second World War. A poll of more than 100 academics in Britain found that the former Labor Party leader should be considered a failure because of the huge debt he left behind, the Daily Mail said in a report. According to the poll results, Brown came tenth out of the 12 post-war premiers, ahead of Anthony Eden and Sir Alec Douglas-Home who both have long been associated with failure. David Cameron was not included in the survey as he has just taken the post of prime minister. Brown was portrayed as the biggest prime ministerial failure in more than 45 years as his predecessor and bitter rival Tony Blair came out as the third successful leader, marginally behind Margaret Thatcher. Labor's post-war leader Clement Attlee has been voted the best UK prime minister who between 1945 and 1951 established the National Health Service (NHS) and welfare state. Harold Macmillan, dubbed Supermac when he led the Tories from 1957 to 1963, came in fourth place. Labor's Harold Wilson (1964-70 and 1974-6) was the fifth, while Winston Churchill only came sixth for his peacetime stint as premier from 1951 to 1955. James Callaghan -- who led Labor during the notorious Winter of Discontent, came higher in the survey than both John Major and Edward Heath, who took Britain into the EU but whose premiership was marred by arguments with the country's miners. Next on the list is Brown, followed by Douglas-Home -- who only led the Conservatives for a year as the party floundered in the wake of the Profumo scandal. At the bottom of the list is Sir Anthony Eden, who led Britain into the disastrous Suez invasion.

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Britain

UK's Brown to quit in bid to keep Labour in power

2010-05-11

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday he would step down this year, sacrificing himself to give his Labor Party a chance of forming a government with the smaller Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems are already being courted by the Conservatives, who did best in an election last week. But Brown said in a statement in front of his official residence at 10 Downing Street that the Lib Dems now wanted to talk to Labor too. The center-right Conservatives, led by David Cameron, won most seats in parliament but fell short of a majority. Labor, in power since 1997, came second and the Liberal Democrats, led by Nick Clegg, a distant third. It is the first time since 1974 that a British election has put no party in overall control. Brown's announcement could make it easier for Labor to lure the Lib Dems away from the Conservatives, since Clegg had signaled strongly during the election campaign that he did not wish to keep the unpopular Brown, 59, in office. "Mr Clegg has just informed me that while he intends to continue his dialogue that he has begun with the Conservatives, he now wishes also to take forward formal discussions with the Labor Party," Brown said, adding that he would facilitate that. "I have no desire to stay in my position longer than is needed," Brown said. "As leader of my party I must accept that that (the election result) is a judgment on me. I therefore intend to ask the Labor Party to set in train the processes needed for its own leadership election," he said.

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Britain

British MPs urge Brown to step down

2010-05-10

[Iran Press TV Latest] Two more Labor Members of Parliament (MP) have urged British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to step down after an inconclusive election stripped the party of its majority in parliament. On Saturday, John Mann became the first backbench MP to call publicly for Brown to quit, insisting that his continued presence in the Downing Street was undermining the prospects of a Labor-Liberal Democrat coalition. The center-right Conservatives, now enjoying the largest representatives in parliament, were holding talks with the smaller, opposition Liberal Democrats on Sunday in an effort to form a new government. Brown must remain as the prime minister pending the formation of a new government. He has said that Labor will open talks with the Liberal Democrats if they fail to seal a deal with the Conservative Party . The beleaguered Labor Party leader's hopes of retaining premiership were further dashed by a Sunday newspaper poll indicating that nearly two-thirds of Britons believe Brown should have already stepped down.

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Home Front: Culture Wars

Steyn: What Arizona Must Live With

2010-05-01

As I write, I have my papers on me -- and not just because I'm in Arizona. I'm an immigrant, and it is a condition of my admission to this great land that I carry documentary proof of my residency status with me at all times and be prepared to produce it to law-enforcement officials, whether on a business trip to Tucson or taking a 20-minute stroll in the woods back at my pad in New Hampshire. Who would impose such an outrageous Nazi fascist discriminatory law? Er, well, that would be Franklin Roosevelt. But don't let the fine print of the New Deal prevent you from going into full-scale meltdown. "Boycott Arizona-stan!" urges MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, surely a trifle Islamophobically. What has some blameless Central Asian basket case done to deserve being compared to a hellhole like Phoenix? Boycott Arizona Iced Tea, jests Travis Nichols of Chicago. It is "the drink of fascists." Just as regular tea is the drink of racists, according to Newsweek's in-depth and apparently non-satirical poll analysis of anti-Obama protests. At San Francisco's City Hall, where bottled water is banned as the drink of climate denialists, Mayor Gavin Newsom is boycotting for real: All official visits to Arizona have been canceled indefinitely. You couldn't get sanctions like these imposed at the U.N. Security Council, but then, unlike Arizona, Iran is not a universally reviled pariah. Will a full-scale economic embargo devastate the Copper State? Who knows? It's not clear to me what San Francisco imports from Arizona. Chaps? But, at any rate, like the bottled-water ban, it sends a strong signal that this kind of hate will not be tolerated. The same day that Mayor Newsom took his bold stand, I saw a phalanx of police officers doing the full Robocop -- black body armor, helmets, and visors -- as they marched down the street. Goosestepping? No, it's actually quite hard to goosestep in those steel-reinforced kneepads. So just regular marching. Naturally, I assumed they were Arizona state troopers performing a routine traffic stop. In fact, they were the police department of Quincy, Ill., facing down a group of genial tea-party grandmas in sun hats and American-flag T-shirts. They were acting at the behest of President Obama's Secret Service, who rightly recognized a polite knot of citizens singing "God Bless America" as a clear and present danger to the republic. If I were a member of the Quincy PD, I'd wear a full-face visor, too, because I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror. It's a tough job making yourself a paramilitary laughingstock. And yet the coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best, apartheid South Africa seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and embarrassing sight of peaceful protesters being menaced by camp stormtroopers from either a dinner-theater space-opera or uniforms night at Mayor Newsom's reelection campaign. Meanwhile, in Britain, a flailing Prime Minister Gordon Brown was on the stump in northern England and met an actual voter, one Gillian Duffy. Alas, she made the mistake of expressing very mild misgivings about immigration. And not the black, brown, and yellow kind, but only the faintly swarthy Balkan blokes from Eastern Europe. And actually, all she said about immigrants was that "you can't say anything about the immigrants." The prime minister brushed it aside blandly, made some chit-chat about her grandkids, and got back in his limo, forgetting that he was still miked. "That was a disaster," he sighed. "Should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that . . . ? She's just this sort of bigoted woman." After the broadcast of his "gaffe," and the sight of Brown slumped with his head in his hands as a radio interviewer replayed the remarks to him, the prime minister found himself going round to Gillian Duffy's home to abase himself before her. Most of the initial commentary focused on what the incident revealed about Gordon Brown's character. But the larger point is what it says about the governing elites and their own voters. Mrs. Duffy is a lifelong supporter of Mr. Brown's Labour party, but she represents the old working class the party no longer has much time for. Travis Nichols may be joking about "the drink of fascists," but, in the same way as Gavin Newsom and Keith Olbermann, Gordon Brown genuinely believes Gillian Duffy has drunk deeply from the drink of bigots for so much as raising the subject of immigration. How dare she! Ungrateful bigot! Gillian Duffy lives in the world Gordon Brown has created. He, on the other hand, gets into his chauffeured limo and is whisked far away from it. That's Arizona. To the coastal commentariat, "undocumented immigrants" are the people who mow your lawn while you're at work and clean your office while you're at home. (That, for the benefit of Linda Greenhouse, is the real apartheid: the acceptance of a permanent "undocumented" servant class by far too many "documented" Americans who assuage their guilt by pathetic sentimentalization of immigration.) But in border states, illegal immigration is life and death. I spoke this week to a lady who has a camp of illegals on the edge of her land: She lies awake at night, fearful for her children and alert to strange noises in the yard. President Obama, shooting from his lip, attacked the new law as an offense against "fairness." Where's the fairness for this woman's family? Because her home is in Arizona rather than Hyde Park, Chicago, she's just supposed to get used to living under siege? Like Gillian Duffy in northern England, this lady has to live there, while the political class that created this situation climbs back into the limo and gets driven far away. Almost every claim made for the benefits of mass immigration is false. Europeans were told that they needed immigrants to help prop up their otherwise unaffordable social entitlements: In reality, Turks in Germany have three times the rate of welfare dependency as ethnic Germans, and their average retirement age is 50. Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole. But wait: What about the broader economic benefits? The World Bank calculated that if rich countries increased their workforce by a mere 3 percent through admitting an extra 14 million people from developing countries, it would benefit the populations of those rich countries by $139 billion. Wow! As Christopher Caldwell points out in his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, "The aggregate gross domestic product of the advanced economies for the year 2008 is estimated by the International Monetary Fund at close to $40 trillion." So an extra $139 billion works out to a spectacular 0.35 percent. Caldwell compares the World Bank argument to Austin Powers's nemesis, Dr. Evil, holding the world hostage for one million dollars! "Sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back." A dependence on mass immigration is not a gold-mine or an opportunity to flaunt your multicultural bona fides, but a structural weakness, and should be addressed as such. The majority of Arizona's schoolchildren are already Hispanic. So, even if you sealed the border today, the state's future is as a Hispanic society; that's a given. Maybe it'll all work out swell. The citizenry never voted for it, but they got it anyway. Because all the smart guys in the limos bemoaning the bigots knew what was best for them.

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Britain

Brown Is Caught on Microphone Calling Voter 'Bigoted'

2010-04-28

Prime Minister Gordon Brown was caught by a microphone calling a voter he'd just met in northern England "a bigoted woman," describing the encounter as "a disaster." Brown was discussing the concerns the voter, Gillian Duffy, had about immigration in Rochdale, near Manchester, as he campaigned before the May 6 election. Brown made the comments, played on Sky News television, while still wearing his microphone after he got back into his car. "She is just the sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour," Brown said in the car. "That was a disaster. Who put me with that woman?" Speaking in an interview on Sky News later, he said he'd apologized to Ms. Duffy. Brown's comment threatens to undermine his campaign, with his Labour Party already in third place in some opinion polls behind the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Gains in seats by the Liberal Democrats have increased the likelihood of a hung Parliament where no party has a majority. "I am very upset," Duffy told reporters in Rochdale after hearing Brown's comments. "He's an educated person, why has he come up with comments like that?" Asked if she wanted an apology from Brown she replied, "Yes, I think so." 'That's All' "I don't want to speak to him again," she said. "I want to know why I was called a bigot, that's all." "We have found out the prime minister's internal thoughts," Conservative Treasury spokesman George Osborne told Sky News television. "He has got a lot of explaining to do." It requires no explanation at all. Mr. Brown is a socialist -- what we in America call a 'progressive'. Socialists and progressives think that anyone who disagrees with them is a bigot. Look at each and every public debate in the US, and you'll find progressives calling their opponents racists. It's the same in Europe. It's humorous in a way: the people who throw the terms 'racist' and 'bigot' around are the very people who categorize each and every person they meet by skin color rather than by the content of their character.

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Britain

Britains Brown calls general election for May 6

2010-04-07

[Al Arabiya Latest] Britain will vote in a general election on May 6, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced on Tuesday, firing the gun on what is set to be the closest poll race in nearly 20 years. Brown made the announcement in Downing Street flanked by his entire Cabinet after visiting Buckingham Palace to ask Queen Elizabeth II to issue a royal proclamation dissolving the current parliament. "It will come as no surprise to all of you, and it's probably the least well kept secret of recent years but the queen has kindly agreed to the dissolution of parliament and a general election will take place on May 6," he said. Gordon's hoping he's gonna pull it off. The opposition's trying to help him, but the voters still have a little bit to say about it. I just want to know how large a share the anti-immigrant party will get, because if it's substantial the national conversation will have to change. Brown's announcement triggers a month-long general election campaign in which his centre-left Labor party will battle to overturn the opinion poll lead held by David Cameron's center-right Conservatives, who are bidding to take power for the first time in 13 years. In a well-trailed contest likely to be dominated by the economy, Brown, 59, is contrasting his role in steering Britain to economic recovery after the global financial crisis with what he says is 43-year-old Cameron's inexperience. "Fresh start" Cameron, who has extensively modernized the once pro-market party of Margaret Thatcher since taking over as leader in 2005, called it "the most important general election for a generation." Speaking shortly before Brown, he said Britain needed a "fresh start" and told supporters: "If we win this election, there will be real change." "Change you can believe in!" Cameron's Conservatives had established a long-term double-digit lead over Brown's Labor before January's announcement that Britain had emerged from its worst recession since World War II. That then dropped away to single figures but has begun to widen out again in recent days. A survey for the Daily Express newspaper Monday gave the Tories a commanding 10-point lead, which could give them a majority in the Commons. But in a sign of the variations in opinion polls, a survey for the Guardian newspaper the same day showed Labor closing the gap, just four points behind Cameron's party. Whoever wins faces having to tackle a crippling budget deficit of at least 167 billion pounds ($254 billion, 188 billion euros) and a fragile economy which some experts say could still dip back into recession. Brown is fighting his first general election as prime minister, having taken over unopposed from Tony Blair in June 2007. The Conservatives need a huge swing of 6.9 percent to secure victory -- equivalent to the landslide which swept Labor led by Blair to power in 1997.

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Home Front: Politix

Disrespecting foreign allies

2010-04-02

By Charles Krauthammer What is it like to be a foreign ally of Barack Obama's America? If you're a Brit, your head is spinning. It's not just the personal slights to Prime Minister Gordon Brown -- the ridiculous 25-DVD gift, the five refusals before Brown was granted a one-on-one with The One. Nor is it just the symbolism of Obama returning the Churchill bust that was in the Oval Office. Query: If it absolutely had to be out of Obama's sight, could it not have been housed somewhere else on U.S. soil rather than ostentatiously repatriated? Perhaps it was the State Department official who last year denied there even was a special relationship between the U.S. and Britain, a relationship cultivated by every U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt. And then there was Hillary Clinton's astonishing, nearly unreported (in the U.S.) performance in Argentina last month. She called for Britain to negotiate with Argentina over the Falklands. For those who know no history -- or who believe that it began on Jan. 20, 2009 -- and therefore don't know why this was an out-of-the-blue slap at Britain, here's the back story: In 1982, Argentina's military junta invaded the (British) Falkland Islands. The generals thought the British, having long lost their taste for foreign lands, would let it pass. Besides, the Falklands have uncountably more sheep than people. They underestimated Margaret Thatcher (the Argentines, that is, not the sheep). She was not about to permit the conquest of a people whose political allegiance and ethnic ties are to Britain. She dispatched the navy. Britannia took it back. Afterward, neither Thatcher nor her successors have countenanced negotiations. Britain doesn't covet foreign dominion and has no shortage of sheep. But it does believe in self-determination, and will negotiate nothing until and unless the Falkland Islanders indicate their desire to be ruled by a chronically unstable, endemically corrupt polity with a rich history of dictatorship, economic mismanagement and the occasional political lunacy (see: the Evita cult). Not surprisingly, the Falkland Islanders have given no such indication. Yet inexplicably, Clinton sought to reopen a question that had been settled for almost 30 years, not just pointlessly stirring the embers but even taking the Argentine side (re: negotiations) against Britain -- a nation that has fought and bled with us for the last decade, and that today has about 10,000 troops, far more than any other ally, fighting alongside America in Afghanistan. Of course, given how the administration has treated other allies, perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised. -- Obama visits China and soon Indonesia, skipping India, our natural and rising ally in the region -- common language, common heritage, common democracy, common jihadist enemy. Indeed, in his enthusiasm for China, Obama suggests a Chinese interest in peace and stability in South Asia, a gratuitous denigration of Indian power and legitimacy in favor of a regional rival with hegemonic ambitions. -- Poland and the Czech Republic have their legs cut out from under them when Obama unilaterally revokes a missile defense agreement, acquiescing to pressure from Russia with its dreams of regional hegemony over Eastern Europe. -- The Hondurans still can't figure out why the United States supported a Hugo Chavez ally seeking illegal extension of his presidency against the pillars of civil society -- its Congress, Supreme Court, church and army -- that had deposed him consistent with Article 239 of their own constitution. But the Brits, our most venerable, most reliable ally, are the most disoriented. "We British not only speak the same language. We tend to think in the same way. We are more likely than anyone else to provide tea, sympathy and troops," writes Bruce Anderson in London's Independent, summarizing with admirable concision the fundamental basis of the U.S.-British special relationship. Well, said David Manning, a former British ambassador to the U.S., to a House of Commons committee reporting on that very relationship: "He (Obama) is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes, if you like, are not there." I'm not personally inclined to neuropsychiatric diagnoses, but Manning's guess is as good as anyone's. How can you explain a policy toward Britain that makes no strategic or moral sense? And even if you can, how do you explain the gratuitous slaps to the Czechs, Poles, Indians and others? Perhaps when an Obama Doctrine is finally worked out, we shall learn whether it was pique, principle or mere carelessness.

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Southeast Asia

UN to meet on Myanmar

2010-03-24

[Straits Times] THE United Nations said on Tuesday it would host a meeting on Myanmar here later this week amid concern about new electoral laws that disqualify detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi. UN spokesman Martin Nesirky told a press briefing that the so-called Group of Friends of Myanmar would meet at UN headquarters on Thursday. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for the informal meeting to mull Myanmar's new electoral laws ahead of upcoming national polls, which will be the first to be held in 20 years. The new laws relate to the registration of political parties and bar anyone serving a prison term from being a member of an official party. The Group of friends of Myanmar brings together Australia, Britain, China, the European Union, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Norway, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam. It was set up in December 2007 as a forum for informal discussions and for developing shared approaches to back UN efforts to promote democracy and national reconciliation in Myanmar.

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