The Guardian (London)

In the Democratic presidential scuffle over extricating the U.S. from Iraq, differences among the candidates have faded into the background recently. But the rivals are diverging on an equally incendiary foreign policy issue: the political instability in Pakistan.

The party's White House hopefuls moved swiftly to condemn Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf after he suspended the constitution and imposed emergency rule on November 3. Since taking early shots at the Bush administration over the crisis, however, the Democrats each have carved out… more

The US Senate judiciary committee has drawn a line in the water -- and is holding it. Before the committee's Democrats approve Michael Mukasey's nomination for attorney general, they want to know that he believes waterboarding is torture under United States law. Simulating drowning to get terrified detainees to speak, a favourite technique of the Khmer Rouge, strikes many as a paradigm of torture. If it isn't torture, what does the word mean?

This is about more than a terrible practice.… more

One of the standard complaints about Hillary Clinton's candidacy is that she reminds everyone of 15 years of partisan anger. Like Pavlov's bells, the story goes, she starts Americans salivating over mental maps of red and blue. There's something to that. Many Bush supporters loathed both Clintons, and liberals have amply returned the sentiment since 2000.

But bitter partisan division isn't a genetic disorder of the country's two dynastic houses, the hemophilia of 21st-century American politics. Something else links the Clintons… more

Critics of the Iraq war have called it George Bush’s Vietnam. Now, it appears, President Bush himself agrees. In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week, the president sought to increase support for his policy by drawing parallels between the consequences of the US departure from Indochina in the mid-1970s and possible consequences of a US withdrawal from Iraq. In Vietnam, the president stated, "the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose… more

...Russia held wargames last week in the Urals involving troops from Russia and China and four central Asian states. Moscow has infuriated Georgia after a Russian missile landed on the outskirts of its capital, Tbilisi. Much of the military posturing is for internal consumption, ahead of parliamentary elections in December and a presidential poll in spring. Pictures showing a shirtless Mr Putin on a fishing trip have been a source of national pride.

The U.S. appears relaxed about this… more

In Japan (and the US perhaps), embarrassment and shame are so, well, 20th century. In the old days, a hot financial scandal or political defeat would lead at minimum to resignation -- and occasionally, to far worse self-inflicted circumstances, such as ritual suicide.

But none of that for Japan’s embattled Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has accepted responsibility but refused to resign for the collapse of his government coalition’s standing in the upper house of Japan’s National Diet in last Sunday’s… more

Can anything good possibly come out of President Bush’s Middle East speech earlier this week and the flurry of diplomatic activity that will come in its wake beginning today with the Quartet meeting in Lisbon, Portugal?

First of all, let’s be clear. The speech represented more of the same failed policies with even less chance of success. Anyone who thinks that the new speech was a constructive contribution should read an op-ed by Michael Oren in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal… more

President George Bush turned 61 today but he did not have much to celebrate at the end of a week, in which his isolation and crumbling support has been exposed as never before...

These low-key birthday celebrations apart, the week ended as badly as it began. The public backlash against his decision on Monday to commute the jail sentence of the former White House aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was followed yesterday by the withdrawal of support by Pete Dominici, a Republican… more

Pundits have had fun poking at the Bush-Blair concoction that the outgoing prime minister be reinvented through solving one of the world’s seemingly insoluble conflicts. Bush has proposed that Blair represent the "Quartet" -- composed of the UN, the US, Russia and the European Union -- in attempts to secure Israeli-Palestinian peace, with an official announcement coming tomorrow.

I happen to think that Colin Powell would be a better envoy, or James Baker, or Tom Daschle, or Bill Clinton, or maybe… more

I have no way of checking this, but my suspicion is that President Bush is a keen fan of the Pointer Sisters. Only an early morning presidential workout to their hit song "I’m So Excited" that then embedded itself in Bush’s head, the way morning tunes tend to do, could possibly explain the phraseology he used yesterday to describe the Palestinian situation.

In a short press conference at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the president three… more