Archives for 2008

After having celebrated New Year’s Eve in style for the first time since 2002, Baghdad awoke on the first of the year to bad news. In a signature tactic of the Salafi Jihadis in Iraq, a suicide bomber detonated his payload at a Shiite commemoration for the departed in Zayouna, a mixed neighborhood of east […]

Pakistan’s electoral commission announced Tuesday that the elections scheduled for January 8 will be postponed until February. The Pakistan People’s Party objected strenuously to the delay, and threatened to take to the streets with popular protests. Meanwhile, the caretaker government is furiously backtracking on its earlier claims that Benazir Bhutto died of a concussion. The […]

The Maps of War site has a review of Middle Eastern empires beginning about 1800 BC. I’d have added a couple of phases at the end, including the Cold War divisions of states by their alliances with the US and the Soviet Union, and then the new US empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus bases […]

It looks increasingly as though someone in the military government in Pakistan may have been somehow complicit in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. An attorney for the physicians who put out the story that Ms. Bhutto died of a concussion went to CNN on Monday and said that his clients were pressured by the military. […]

Here are some trends that I hope continue and deepen in 2008. Turkey and Indonesia are making strides as secular democracies in Muslim-majority countries, with impressive political participation on the part of the public, with elections that produce surprises for the powers that be, and with steady economic growth. The striking thing about both of […]

New Zogby Poll (reprinted by permission) confirms Edwards surge in Iowa but disconfirms Romney lead or Huckabee decline. ‘UTICA, New York—The race for the Democratic presidential nomination tightened slightly over the last 24 hours, but Senator Hillary Clinton retained her edge over rivals Barack Obama and John Edwards, a new Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby daily tracking poll in […]