by David Steven | Nov 28, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America
Classy commentary from Frank Gaffney Jr in the Washington Times:
It is fitting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chose the U.S. Naval Academy for the venue of today’s so-called Mideast peace conference. The reputation of that extraordinary institution in Annapolis has been sullied in recent years by a succession of rapes of young women.
Despite official efforts to low-ball its significance, Miss Rice’s conclave is shaping up to be a gang-rape of a nation on a scale not seen since Munich in 1938, when the British and French allowed Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to have their violent way with Czechoslovakia.
This time, the intended victim is Israel.
by Richard Gowan | Nov 25, 2007 | Conflict and security
Time for an update on the peacekeeping shortage, which gets a lot of well-deserved attention in the current edition of The Economist. Oh that this could have been the last word on the matter – but things have got substantially worse since the magazine was being put to bed in the middle of last week. It looks worryingly like the UN is going to dragged deeper into all-out war in the eastern Congo, where it only narrowly avoided a breakdown earlier this year. Meanwhile, the EU may be about to flunk badly on Chad.
In theory, the Europeans are going to send 4,000 troops and 10 helicopters to Chad to operate alongside UN police. This would be the EU’s biggest mission in Africa to date – but I’ve found a lot of officials are pretty skeptical that it’ll work. The main problem is, by now grindingly familiar: nobody wants to risk any helicopters for the mission. And without helicopters, the troops will sit trapped in vulnerable bases, etc, etc.
After this shortage became clear at a pledging conference in Brussels last week, one EU diplomat was briefing that “cancelling the mission is an option.” The strain has started to show in public. Just before the meeting, Ireland’s defense minister Willie O’Dea was offering troops, but explaining that his helicopters can’t operate beyond the Emerald Isle. He did have ideas about who could, but they weren’t making him any friends:
Asked whether the Darfur spillover mission could proceed without these aircraft, O’Dea said: “In short – no.”
He specified Germany and Italy as two countries with “ample military resources, and so far they haven’t made any contribution to this particular mission.”
The German government declined to comment Tuesday. Last month, German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said his country was willing to provide only “political support.”
The Foreign Ministry in Rome confirmed no troops would be sent to Chad and indicated no comment would be made in response to O’Dea. But the Italian Foreign Ministry pointed out Italy is the leading contributor to the U.N. force in Lebanon and has troops in Afghanistan and the Balkans.
And, the Ministry might have added, they are quite nervous enough about those deployments as it is. While O’Dea was calling for Rome to step forward, his Italian counterpart Arturo Parisi was trying to rank the problems on his agenda:
Arturo Parisi said potential change in Kosovo trumped short-term security concerns elsewhere, describing Afghanistan, for example, as “stable in its instability”.
“Kosovo is surely (the biggest concern). It is exposed to a change and therefore a possible stress,” Parisi told Reuters in an interview. “It is also the closest region (to Italy).”
And Lebanon? It’s “unsettled”. While “stable in its instability” is an interesting new category for peacekeeping academics to set about defining (it’s certainly a lot more revealing than “fragile states”) the overall message is crystal clear. Don’t expect the EU to play the peacekeeping (air) cavalry, especially in a second-order crisis like Chad.
So if the UN’s overstretched and the EU’s over-committed (or at least claims to be), who’s left? Optimists keep on pointing to China, which has gradually been increasing its UN commitments as part of its Africa strategy. UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno was in Beijing last week to press for more contributions. But this weekend, one Darfuri rebel leader welcomed the first Chinese troops to deploy there with a call to quit Sudan immediately, on the grounds that Beijing is complicit with Khartoum. “I am not saying I will attack them. I will not say I will not attack them,” quotes the BBC.
It’s hard not to feel a creeping sense of despair.
by Alex Evans | Nov 22, 2007 | Influence and networks
Dan Drezner is pondering how to answer all the people who ask him “how do you successfully pursue a career in foreign policy?”. He finds that Peter Singer at Brookings proffers the following advice:
by Mark Weston | Nov 22, 2007 | Africa
You know you’re in trouble when you need combat camels to save you. The latest masterstroke in the world’s response to the genocide in Darfur is to import specially trained Indian camels to transport African Union and United Nations peacekeepers around the province. The Sudanese government, the main aggressor in the conflict, has helicopter gunships, but the peacekeepers will have to chase these on humpback because the West won’t send in its own helicopters.
All is not lost, however – Darfurians can be reassured that the camels will have gone through a “crash course in combat” where they will learn how to crawl and, according to the head of the Indian army’s camel division, perform other “soldierly movements.” Phew.
by Mark Weston | Nov 22, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
OK it’s Haaretz, a left-wing rag, but hey. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo?an, they argue, is the pick of today’s rum bunch of global leaders. Without him, “belligerent Iran, medieval Saudi Arabia or shaky Pakistan (caught in the calipers of sinister madrasas and a state of emergency) would be setting the tone.” Haaretz even parades Tayyip’s charms before a sceptical European Union, warning:
“You have 70 million Turks in your court, Europe. Instead of embracing Turkey, you are sending it scurrying hither and yon. Instead of proving that this is not a matter of ego, prejudice and xenophobia, you are humiliating the very sane alternative that Turkey represents.
“As though the Turkish democracy is the only one that’s not perfect, the only one whose laws are flawed and in need of amendment – the only one violating civil and human rights.”
The latter point echoes a letter I wrote to the FT in September bemoaning the double standards surrounding Turkey’s EU accession, but Tayyip might be useful for Israel as well as Europe. As a friend of the country but also a respected and devout Muslim, could he be just the man to act as honest broker with the Palestinians?
