US President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world delivered in Cairo on June 4 was quite rhetorical duly impressing his audience. He touched all the right emotional buttons: commencing his address with the traditional Muslim greeting of Assalamu alaikum and quoting verses from the Qur’an.
On the political front, it appears the US has resigned itself to the fact that there is nobody capable of replacing Karzai at present.
It was bound to happen; in fact, the US wants it this way. Its gross failures in Afghanistan are not only blamed on others, the war is also deliberately being spread to Pakistan and the Central Asian republics with frightening consequences. The expan
Imperialist countries have created a vast array of instruments to force the rest of the world to follow their diktats. To such high sounding bodies as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that respectively manipulate
The West has a peculiar attitude to global problems. In addition to its favourite bogey—war on terror—there is much talk about human rights, respect for the rule of law, the will of the “international community” and fighting racism yet it remains in denial about its own misdeeds.
US President Barack Obama’s Nowruz video message to “the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” on March 20 created quite a stir globally but it did not impress Iran’s leadership, its intended audience. The reasons are clear but first let us look at some of the positive aspects of Obama’s message. He is perhaps the first US president to address the country by its correct name: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Every day brings more bad news about the state of the US economy, and indeed that of much of the rest of the world. Not only is America’s economy the largest in the world, its currency—the dollar—is also the global reserve currency with 63 percent of the world’s central bank reserves held in dollars.
Even while the economic tsunami hit the US, George Bush insisted that economic fundamentals were strong. When asked about the collapsing US economy at his last press conference as president, he replied, “I am not an economist; neither are you, by the way. I am an optimist and I believe the economy will eventually turn around.”
By challenging Israeli President Shimon Peres in Davos on January 29, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan captured the imagination of millions of people, especially Muslims, around the world. His 56-word response to Peres echoed globally: “You are older than me and your voice is very loud. The reason for your raising your voice is the psychology of guilt. I will not raise my voice that much.
Israel’s three-week long offensive on the tiny desert patch called Ghazzah has once again revealed the barbaric nature of the zionist state. Showing complete disregard for civilian lives, many of them children, whom they deliberately and repeatedly targeted, the zionists stand exposed as war criminals.
The official Indian version of the November 26–28 Mumbai attacks is well known. Ten members of Lashkar-e Taiba, a Pakistani paramilitary organization banned in 2005 as a terrorist organization, came in rubber boats — unnoticed by the Indian Navy that was conducting naval exercises in the area at the time — to attack Mumbai landmarks.
The celebrations in large parts of the US and most of the rest of the world following the election of Barack Obama as next president of the USA were perhaps understandable, even though there was very little chance of his failing to be elected, given the totality of the failure of the neo-cons under George W. Bush over the previous eight years.
By the time many readers see this issue of Crescent International, the US presidential elections will have taken place and the results known. Failing some drastic turnaround in the last days of campaigning (after Crescent goes to press), Barack Obama is likely to be confirmed as the US’s first black president, in what is already being widely anticipated as a total and deliberate repudiation of the legacy of the presidency of George W. Bush.
After months of debate and negotiation, punctuated by periodic reports of progress and agreement on various final drafts, the talks between the US and the Iraqi government on a new Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) appear no closer to a conclusion than ever before.
The recent history of Pakistan seems to be one of crisis after crisis, punctuated only by periods of waiting to see what the next crisis will be. Developments in the last month, however, have been ominous and dangerous even by Pakistani standards, raising genuine fears that the crisis now developing may reduce the country to levels of disorder and chaos unprecedented even in Pakistan’s turbulent history.
For people above a certain age, there is something almost comfortingly familiar about the international politicking over Russia’s invasion of Georgia and its subsequent recognition of the ‘independence’ of the two separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
When US and Iraqi officials said on August 25 that they had agreed a text for the long-awaited treaty covering a full withdrawal of US troops by 2011, it should have been a major political story. The fact that it wasn’t reflects certain political realities that make the treaty virtually worthless.
As events in Bosnia unfolded in the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the collapse of the communist bloc in 1989, Muslims were initially surprised to discover the previously little-noticed Muslim population of central Europe, and then shocked by the attempt to exterminate them.
The US is facing two deadlines in its dealings with the government in Iraq over the proposed “security treaty” by which it hopes to legitimise its continued occupation of the country. The first is the expiry of the UN mandate to remain in the country, which expires on December 31.
The last couple of months have seen a sudden increase in Western attention on Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons programme. The campaign is being led by Israel, whose politicians have openly threatened military action against Iran if the UN agencies fail to pressurise it into stopping its nuclear programme.
