International Herald Tribune

This is one of those times of maximum mismatch between the optimistic rhetoric of peace process declarations and expectations and the gloomy reality of daily experience and prospects on the ground.

The Annapolis architect, President George W. Bush, is back in the Middle East, still declaring the worthy goal of peace in '08. But the fundamentally flawed logic of the process initiated last year is increasingly transparent.

The economic, social and health conditions of Gazans collapse further as the siege continues; rockets… more

With the Annapolis conference and the Paris fund-raising effort to aid the Palestinians behind us, the Middle East peace process is now in need of constant vigilance. President George W. Bush will visit the region in January, but it is Condoleezza Rice who will be looked upon to provide a guiding hand.

The new peace effort is very much her baby. A look at the war in Lebanon last summer, and Rice's management of it, provides some clues to the challenges… more

In the storm over President Pervez Musharraf's declaration of a state of emergency in Pakistan, a number of critically important things have been overlooked -- important not only in themselves, but in what they say about the ways in which Pakistan works and doesn't work.

The first is that as coups go, this has been a pretty genteel kind . The comparisons being made between this and events in Burma or Uzbekistan are false. At the time of this writing, no… more

After seven lean years, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are back on the agenda for a planned summit meeting next month in Annapolis, Maryland. Intriguingly, the return of the peace process coincides with an unusual public debate taking place in America regarding the U.S.-Israel relationship following the attention received by a book about the Israel lobby.

The debate triggered by the authors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, has understandably touched on raw emotions and too often degenerated into name-calling. But it has also… more

WASHINGTON -- The storming of the Red Mosque in Islamabad was a Pakistani action, undertaken for Pakistani reasons. Critical actions of future Pakistani governments, civilian or military, will be taken for the same basic reasons -- and not at the desire of Washington. American presidents can of course bring great pressure to bear on Pakistan, but for obvious reasons, they are unlikely ever to get a Pakistani government to commit suicide on their behalf.

It is important to point this out… more

The present crisis in relations between the European Union and Russia is being exaggerated on both sides. Part of the problem is that too many Western commentators still set as their standard for good relations the utterly Western ambition of the early 1990s -- a ‘‘democratic’’ Russia that would be completely subservient to the West.

Russians too are often still reacting to their experience of humiliation and exploitation in the 1990s with a counterproductive prickliness, arrogance and suspicion. Both sides need… more

Two things should be clear concerning America’s Cuba policy: Everything the United States has tried over the past five decades has failed, and it is high time that Washington does something to help transform the country’s Communist system.

The impending transition of power from Fidel Castro to his brother Raúl gives Washington the chance to adopt a new strategy. But if the United States sticks to the current approach it will help consolidate Communist rule for many years to come.

A changed… more

A classic mistake in military strategy is to become so obsessed with a secondary objective that it comes to dominate your entire campaign, not only sucking away essential resources from other, more important goals, but actually working against them.

This process can often be self-reinforcing. Once a particular issue has been publicly proclaimed as vital, then your prestige demands that you must sacrifice more and more to achieve it and the more you sacrifice, the less possible it becomes to admit… more

Every political, social and economic system ever created has sooner or later encountered a challenge that its very nature has made it incapable of meeting. The Confucian ruling system of imperial China, which lasted for more than 2,000 years, has some claim still to be the most successful in history, but because it was founded on values of stability and continuity, rather than dynamism and inventiveness, it eventually proved unable to survive in the face of Western imperial capitalism.

For market… more

Now that the Democrats effectively control Congress, it’s no longer enough for them simply to attack the administration for its past incompetence and recklessness in Iraq.

They have to come up with some serious and convincing strategies of their own. So far, they have completely failed to do so.

With any real hopes for democratic or even effective central government in Iraq now dead, the Bush administration no longer even really knows what it is aiming at in that country. On the… more