I couldn’t help a deep, unhealthy chuckle when I watched the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy arrive outside the wooden doors of Saint George’s Maronite Cathedral in Beirut this week. A throb of applause drifted through the tens of thousands of Lebanese who had gathered for the funeral of murdered Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel. Here, after all, was the representative of the nation which had supported the eviction of the Syrian Army last year, whose president had been a friend of the equally murdered ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, whose support in the UN Security Council was helping to set up the tribunal which will--will it, we ask ourselves in Beirut these days?--try the killers of both Hariri and Gemayel.
Douste-Blazy was aware of all this, of course, and uttered a statement of such self-serving exaggeration that even Lord Blair of Kut Al-Amara would have felt jealous. “President Jacques Chirac is the best defender on earth of Lebanon ’s sovereignty,“ he proclaimed. “ France is determined ... now more than ever (to) defend Lebanon ’s sovereignty and independence.“ Now I’m not sure I would want the man who once embraced Saddam Hussein as a close friend to be my greatest defender, let alone my greatest defender “on earth“--funny, isn’t it, how the French can never shake off their Napoleonic self-regard--and like the doggy poo on Parisian streets, I’d certainly want to tread carefully around France’s interest in Lebanon’s “independence.“
I hasten to add that--compared to the mendacious, utterly false, repulsively hypocritical and cancerous foreign policy of Dame Beckett of Basra--Chirac’s dealings with France ’s former colonies and mandates are positively Christ-like in their integrity. But the Lebanon that France was to create after World War I was to be based on the sectarian divisions which the infamous Francois Georges-Picot had observed earlier as a humble consul in this jewel of the old Ottoman Empire, divided as it was between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims and Druze and Christian Maronites--France’s favorite community and the faith of the murdered Pierre Gemayel--and the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics and the Chaldeans and the rest. At that time the Maronites represented a thin majority, but emigration and their propensity for smaller families than their Muslim neighbors steadily turned the Christians into a minority which may now number 29 percent or less.
But the French wanted the Maronites to run Lebanon and thus after independence bequeathed them the presidency. Sunni Muslims would hold the prime ministership and the Shiites, who are today the largest community, would be compensated by holding the speakership of Parliament. The French thus wanted Lebanon ’s “independence“--but they wanted it to be in France ’s favor.
Two problems immediately presented themselves to the Lebanese. By claiming the largest area which it was possible to rule with the tiniest majority--the Maronite religious leader of the time, Patriarch Hayek, was responsible for this--the Christians ensured that they would soon be outnumbered and thus rule their country from a position of minority power.
The other Lebanese problem is that a sectarian state, where only Maronites can be the president and where only Sunnis can be the prime minister, cannot be a modern state. Yet if you take away the sectarianism France created, Lebanon will no longer be Lebanon . The French realized all this in the same way--I suspect--as the Americans have now realized the nature of their sectarian monster in Iraq . Listen to what that great Arab historian, Albert Hourani, wrote about the experience of being a Levantine in 1946--and apply it to Iraq . To live in such a way, Hourani wrote: “is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it.... It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one’s own. It reveals itself in lostness, cynicism and despair.“
Amid such geopolitical uncertainties, it is easy for Westerners to see these people in the borders and colors in which we have chosen to define them.
Hence all those newspaper maps of Lebanon--Shiites at the bottom and on the right, the Sunnis and Druze in the middle and at the top, and the Christians uneasily wedged between Beirut and the northern Mediterranean coast. We draw the same sectarian maps of Iraq--Shiites at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle (the famous “Sunni triangle“ though it is not triangular at all) and Kurds at the top.
And thus we divide the “other,“ while assiduously denying the “other“ in ourself. This is what the French did in Lebanon , what the British did in Northern Ireland and the Americans are now doing in Iraq .
In this way, we maintain our homogenous power. Pierre Gemayel grew up in Bikfaya, firmly in that wedge of territory north of Beirut . Many Lebanese now fear a conflict between those who support the “democracy“ to which Gemayel belonged and the Shiites, the people--in every sense of the word--at the “bottom.“ And the French are going to ensure the country in which all these poor people are trapped remains “independent.“
Robert Fisk
INDEPENDENT.CO.UK

Pope Benedict XVI

St Sophia’s is a place of dizzying magnificence. One of the most sacred sites in Christendom for the best part of a millennium, made over into the sultans’ mosque of choice for almost 500 years, the Byzantine masterpiece today is a museum that testifies to centuries of feuding between Christianity, Islam, and secularism. So when Pope Benedict XVI takes to the Istanbul tourist trail next Thursday to admire the mosaics under the soaring dome of the sixth century basilica, it will be the most delicate moment of the most sensitive trip the 79-year-old Bavarian has ever made.
Four days in Turkey will pitch the pontiff into the eye of the storm he churned up in September when he linked Islam and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) with violence and inhumanity as a force of unreason.
And the eight minutes he is to spend in the cavernous St Sophia’s on Thursday afternoon will be watched and weighed for signals of the Vatican’s true intent towards Turkey and, more crucially, the world’s Muslims. Will the pontiff pray at the place the Turks call Ayasofya that the Greeks know as Haghia Sophia? Will he genuflect? Or quietly re-consecrate the shrine? He is likely, say those in the know, to cross himself as he enters the museum. The risk is that Benedict will send Turkey’s Muslims and much of the Islamic world into paroxysms of fury if there is any perception that the Pope is trying to re-appropriate a Christian centre that fell to the Muslims in 1453 when Byzantine Constantinople became Ottoman Istanbul.
“It won’t be good if he prays here. It will offend our people,“ said Mehmet Tayyar Kaya, a Turkish Muslim visiting the shrine with his wife and son.
The St Sophia dilemma is but one illustration of the challenge facing Benedict as he seeks in the days ahead to navigate the treacherous front line between Christianity and Islam. An old man in a young papacy, he delivered the most unfortunate speech of his 19 months as Pope at a Bavarian university 10 weeks ago. Willy-nilly, he nourished the hopes and prejudices of those who see in the post-9/11 world a “clash of civilisations“ between Islam and the west.
In the wake of the Danish cartoons crisis, in the midst of the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, at a time of European handwringing over how to deal with large Muslim minorities, the Islamic world erupted in outrage at the Pope’s “insult“ to the Prophet. Turkey’s top cleric demanded an apology. Since the September speech Benedict has repeatedly voiced regret for any offence he caused. But he has not retracted his remarks.
The result is that as the papal entourage prepares to arrive first in Ankara on Tuesday, before moving on to Izmir and Istanbul, the Vatican appears to be on the defensive, while Turkey and the Islamic world are suspicious and hostile. The banks of the Bosphorus are plastered with banners declaring: “We don’t want the Pope in Turkey.“ The potential for trouble is high, the security operation is immense--gunboats on the Bosphorus, snipers galore, decoy popemobiles. The Turkish government insists Benedict is welcome, but at one time was having trouble fielding high-level figures to meet him. Recep Tayyip Erdogan originally had a pressing engagement elsewhere, but last night a government official said Turkey’s prime minister was hoping to meet the Pope on his arrival in the country after all.
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

The good news is that the Republicans lost. The bad news is that the Democrats won.
The burning issue--US withdrawal from Iraq--remains as far from resolution as before.
A clear majority of Americans are opposed to the war and almost all of them would be very happy if the US military began the process of leaving Iraq tomorrow, if not today. The rest of the world would breathe a great sigh of relief and their long-running love affair with the storybook place called “America“ could begin to come back to life.
A State Department poll conducted in Iraq this past summer dealt with the population’s attitude toward the American occupation. Apart from the Kurds--who assisted the US military before, during, and after the invasion and occupation, and don’t think of themselves as Iraqis--most people favored an immediate withdrawal, ranging from 56% to 80% depending on the area.
The State Department report added that majorities in all regions except Kurdish areas said that the departure of coalition forces would make them feel safer and decrease violence.
George W. is on record declaring that if the people of Iraq ask the United States to leave, the US will leave. He also has declared that the Iraqis are “not happy they’re occupied. I wouldn’t be happy if I were occupied either.“
Yet, despite all this, and much more, the United States remains, with predictions from Pentagon officials that American forces will be in Iraq for years. Large US military bases are being constructed there; they’re not designed as temporary structures.
Remember that 61 years after the end of World War II the United States still has major bases in Germany. Fifty-three years after the end of the Korean War the US has tens of thousands of troops in South Korea.
Washington insists that it can’t leave Iraq until it has completed training and arming a police force and army which will keep order. Not only does this inject thousands more armed men--often while in uniform--into the raging daily atrocities, it implies that the United States is concerned about the welfare and happiness of the Iraqi people, a proposition rendered bizarre by almost four years of inflicting upon those same people a thousand and one varieties of hell on earth, literally destroying their ancient and modern civilization.
We are being asked to believe that the American military resists leaving because some terrible thing will befall their beloved Iraqi brethren. (“We bomb you because we care about you“ ... suitable to be inscribed on the side of a cruise missile.)
At the same time, the American occupation fuels hostility by the Sunnis toward Shiite “collaborators“ with the occupation, and vice-versa. And each attack of course calls for retaliation. And the bodies pile up. If the Americans left, both sides could negotiate and participate in the reconstruction of Iraq without fear of being branded traitors. The Iraqi government would lose its quisling stigma. And Iraq’s security forces would no longer have the handicap of being seen to be working on behalf of foreign infidels against fellow Iraqis.
So why don’t the Yanquis just go home? Is all this not rather odd? Three thousand of their own dead, tens of thousands critically maimed. And still they stay. Why, they absolutely refuse to even offer a timetable for withdrawal. No, it’s not odd. It’s oil.
Oil was not the only motivation for the American invasion and occupation, but the other goals have already been achieve--eliminating Saddam Hussein for Israel’s sake, canceling the Iraqi use of the euro in place of the dollar for oil transactions, expansion of the empire in the middle east with new bases.
American oil companies have been busy under the occupation, and even before the US invasion, preparing for a major exploitation of Iraq’s huge oil reserves. William Blum
COUNTERPUNCH.COM

What if 12 asteroids were on collision courses with Earth? What if we could alter their trajectories and save our planet by the cumulative effect of our individual efforts? What if science and history proved that we were fully capable of such heroism? What would it take to get us started?
John Schellnhuber, distinguished science advisor at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Britain , has identified 12 global warming tipping points, such as the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest or the melting of the west Antarctic ice sheet. Any of these, if triggered, would probably initiate sudden changes across the planet as cataclysmic as any asteroid strike.
So what will it take to trigger what we might call the 13th tipping point, the shift from personal denial to personal responsibility? What will tip us toward addressing global warming with the urgency it deserves, as the mother of all threats to homeland security?
A 2005 study on Americans’ perceptions of global warming found that most are moderately concerned, but 68 per cent believe that the greatest threats are to people far away or to nonhuman nature--a dangerous and delusional misperception. Only 13 per cent perceive risk to themselves, their families or their communities.
Many secretly perceive global warming to be an insoluble problem and respond by circling the family wagons and turning inward. Yet human beings are born with powerful tools for solving this quandary. We have the genetic smarts and the cultural smarts. We have the technological know-how. We even have the inclination.
The truth is, we can change ourselves with breathtaking speed, sculpting even “immutable“ human nature. Forty years ago, many believed human nature mandated that blacks and whites live in segregation; 30 years ago human nature divided men and women into separate economies; 20 years ago human nature prevented us from defusing a global nuclear standoff. Nowadays we blame human nature for the insolvable hazards of global warming.
Research out of the Max Planck Institute in Germany suggests how we might help ourselves evolve. Using a variation on game theory, researchers found that almost no one would donate money anonymously, but that the few who did were the ones who knew most about the issue at hand. So we would be inclined to behave as better environmental citizens when we are educated and our individual actions are visible to those around us--a phenomenon known as “social facilitation.“
Perhaps if we’re vigorously informed about how global warming endangers our neighbourhoods, we’ll individually forgo the McMansions and the Hummers and make sustainable choices. Anything less compromises our children’s future.
The nature of tipping points is that they happen dizzyingly fast. The good news is that history proves we’re capable of keeping up. Social scientists once believed that it would take decades of government pressure and education for Americans to choose smaller families because the desire to procreate is an absolute part of the human animal, or so they thought. Yet population growth radically declined over only three years in the 1970s--one woman at a time, without an ounce of government involvement.
Julia Witty
LATIMES.COM

A former Russian intelligence agent is poisoned with a radioactive substance. He is a crony of Russian businessmen in London, men who got rich in Moscow under the lawless presidency of Boris Yeltsin. They are sworn enemies of Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin. Alexander Litvinenko lived dangerously and died mysteriously.
That is where facts end and speculation begins. Because the crime happened in democratic Britain, the public genuinely hopes police might solve it. Had it happened in Moscow, the response would be different: weary acceptance that the case is unfathomable. In Russia, audacious public assassination is a familiar story. Businessmen, politicians and journalists regularly meet such a fate (although usually they are gunned down, not poisoned with radiation). The crimes go unsolved. The truth is lost in conspiracy theories.
Mr Litvinenko’s murder is an outbreak in the London diaspora of a disease that is rife in the motherland and there isn’t much hope of it being solved. But while the police do their best, it is a moment for Britain to look eastwards and ask what sort of a country Russia has become. The answer is: ’Grim.’ The rule of law in Russia is weak; justice is applied selectively to serve political and commercial interests.
Television networks are controlled by the Kremlin. Exercising free speech can be perilous. Journalists risk prison or death if they are too critical of the authorities. Parliament is supine. Independent political activity is stifled. Racist violence is out of control. Last year, at least 28 people were murdered and 366 assaulted on racial grounds. Non-whites live in fear of skinhead gangs.
President Putin is genuinely popular with many Russians. He has brought stability while high energy prices have subsidised rising living standards. But the brutish cynicism that made Russian streets dangerous in the capitalist free-for-all of the Yeltsin years has been concealed, not eliminated, by Mr Putin’s bullying state.
The Russian President, meanwhile, is greeted as an ally in Western capitals for two reasons. First, with a quarter of the world’s natural gas at its disposal, Gazprom, the state monopoly, can supply Europe’s growing energy needs. Second, in 2001, Mr Putin convinced Britain and America that his dirty war in the Chechen republic, now run by a Kremlin-backed puppet regime with a reputation for systematic torture and repression, is a front in the ’war on terror’. In exchange for supporting the war in Afghanistan, Mr Putin won a moratorium on criticism of his undemocratic tendencies. That deal has expired.
The West should continue to engage with Mr Putin. Russia is too big to ignore and its interests and energy infrastructure too intertwined with Europe’s for it to be isolated. But we must be clear about who we are dealing with. Britain should, for example, look sceptically at Gazprom’s declared interest in buying Centrica, formerly British Gas. Gazprom is an arm of the Russian state and should not be allowed control of such a vital asset.
Energy relations with Moscow must be negotiated at the level of the EU, paying heed to new members from the old eastern bloc with their insights into how Russia does business. Economic co-operation with Moscow should come with strings attached to political and judicial reform.
By necessity, we must treat Moscow as a partner in some spheres, but Mr Putin has much to prove before he can be trusted as an ally.
OBSERVER.CO.UK