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Author Archives: Tony
Who’s Got the Power?
President George W. Bush could be forgiven for underestimating China: He had spent some months there in the mid-1970s, when his father was U.S. Ambassador to Beijing. His firsthand experience of a largely pre-industrial colossus could hardly have prepared him for dealing with the China of today — a China to which the U.S. owes some $1.5 trillion and counting, and to which America’s beleaguered banks turn for the multibillion dollar loans required to keep them afloat.
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Posted in Situation Report
7 Comments
The Guilty Pleasure of Fidel Castro
What fascinates me is the guilty pleasure with which so many political leaders around the world revere Fidel Castro — revere him, but wouldn’t dream of emulating his approach to economics or governance. Continue reading
Posted in Situation Report, The Whole World's Africa
Tagged Castro, Cuba, Fidel, Mandela
90 Comments
Honey, I Shrank the Superpower
In a snide reference to Bill Clinton’s 1992 promise to “build a bridge into the 21st century,” Barack Obama recently quipped that what Hillary Clinton really offers is a bridge back into the 20th century. Yet, a bridge back into the last century may be what all the major candidates are offering when they promise to restore the American leadership and primacy. The Republicans promise to restore American power by staying the course in Iraq, threatening Iran, and staring down “radical Islamic terrorism,” which John McCain calls “the transcendent issue of the 21st century.” The Democrats envisage turning the clock back eight years, restoring post-Cold War American primacy simply by adopting a more sober and consensus-based style. The problem, of course, is that while Bush’s
reckless forays into the Middle East have accelerated the decline of America’s strategic influence, there’s little reason to believe that this decline can be reversed either by more of the same, or by a less abrasive tenant in the Oval Office.
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Posted in Annals of Globalization, Featured Analysis
14 Comments
Israel’s Self-Defeating ‘Liquidation’
Guest Column: Uri Avnery, the doyen of Israeli peace campaigners, has seen it all before. With last week’s killing of Hizballah commander Imad Mughniyeh, Israel once again demonstrated an unrivaled capacity to pull off difficult assassinations, and then went into a frenzy of self-congratulation over its prowess. After last year’s failed Lebanon war, Israel’s political-military leadership certainly felt the need to offer its public a psychological pick-me-up. But at what cost? Avnery explores the history of such “liquidations,” as the Israeli establishment calls them, to show that they tend to actually strengthen resistance organizations, while raising the danger to the civilian population of those who carry them out. Continue reading
Posted in Guest Columns, Situation Report
21 Comments
The Fish is in the Mail
You’d think that avowed Christians would have remembered that Biblical lesson about the difference between giving a poor man a fish, and giving him a fishing pole — or a job on a snoek boat, or a deepwater hake factory ship, you know what I’m getting at. Nope, when President Bush hands out $1.5 trillion with the approval of the Democratic Congress, it’s going to be all fish. Checks mailed out in the spring, $600 or $1200, on the bizarre assumption that these will somehow be serve as a defibrillator on the flagging economy.
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Posted in 99c Blogging, Situation Report
15 Comments
Learning From Arab Jews
Guest Column: David Shasha, the founder and director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York, is one of my favorite weekly email reads. (You can subscribe, too, by contacting him directly.) Arab and Jew are not mutually exclusive categories. Quite the contrary. Anyone who tells you, as so many “pundits” do in this society when trying to explain the Middle East, that “Jews and Arabs have been fighting for thousands of years,” is speaking from ignorance. The idea of a conflict between “Jews” and “Arabs” is really only as old as modern political Zionism, and really only took on a generalized form in the second half of the 20th century amid the trauma that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel. Jews and Arabs had, in fact, lived together for hundreds of years in the Muslim world, and many Jews have always considered themselves Arab.
David Shasha makes the case that this branch of Judaism, what he calls the “Levantine Option”, is tragically silenced and excluded from the mainstream Ashkenazi and Zionist narrative that dominates discussion of the Jewish experience. He argues that while the Ashkenazi tradition was both heavily influenced by Western Christian traditions and also, because of persecution, evolved a far more narrow, insular “shtetl” outlook on Jewish identity. By contrast, he argues, the Sephardic experience, in the “convivienca” of Moorish Spain and the Arab lands in the Islamic golden age actually has much more to offer Jews looking for an expansive, universalist version of their identity in a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan world. It’s fascinating stuff: Read on!
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Posted in A Wondering Jew, Guest Columns, Situation Report
Tagged Arab, Israel, Jewish, Levantine, Sephardic, Zionism
27 Comments
Olmert: His Own Shlemiel, or Bush’s?
While Israel’s Winograd Commission has certainly pulled no punches in excoriating the Israeli military and political leadership for their botched war in Lebanon last summer, there appears to be a massive lacuna in its conclusions. (I’m not even going to get into the question of cluster bombs and other military actions by Israel in that conflict that contravene international law.) Israel clearly went to war in haste without a considered plan, without weighing alternatives, without establishing clear objectives and without an exit strategy. That much Winograd was prepared to say bluntly. But what he doesn’t explain is why things played out in this way. Continue reading
Posted in Situation Report
31 Comments
The Incredible Shrinking Davos Man
Last week’s annual Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum was conspicuous by how little it seemed to matter to anyone — the event passed with hardly a nod from the mainstream media, which had more important things to worry about. But as I wrote on TIME.com, it wasn’t simply that Davos was eclipsed in the news cycle by global stock market wobbles and by Hamas in Gaza wiping the floor with its dunderheaded adversaries (dutifully gathered at Davos, in the persons of Condi Rice, Tony Blair, the Israeli government and the leaders of Fatah). On fronts as different as financial markets and the geopolitics of the Middle East, it has become plain that the political and economic elites of the West have seen a sharp decline in their ability to dictate events. Continue reading
Posted in Situation Report
22 Comments
Buy This Book!
Former New York Times staffer Sarah Boxer has done a wonderful service in her new book Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, showcasing some truly fine writing from the much-hyped blogosphere. Continue reading
Posted in Shameless Cronyism
Comments Off on Buy This Book!
Hamas Blows a Hole in Bush’s Plans
With some carefully placed semtex (or whatever the Palestinian sappers use), Hamas managed to take advantage of the impossible situation the U.S.-Israeli policy had created for Mubarak and for President Mahmoud Abbas, to once again emerge on top. Then again, it ought to be noted that Hamas is blessed by the brutal ineptitude of its enemies. Continue reading
Posted in Situation Report
65 Comments