The Cold War is over, President Bush said in the Czech Republic. To leaders of the major industrialized countries gathering this week in Germany amid a flurry of U.S.-Russian name-calling, it might instead feel as if the Cold War is back.
The U.S.-Russian chill is focused most immediately on an issue with a distinct Cold War echo: missile defense. Washington wants to station 10 interceptors in Poland, with an associated radar in the Czech Republic, Russia’s backyard.
The missile shield itself is expensive, unproven and almost beside the point. At best, building it would provide an extra layer of security, if only as a psychological deterrent to rogue regimes. It is no threat to Russia, which could easily overwhelm any defense with its vast arsenal.
Even so, Russian President Vladimir Putin says he doesn’t buy assurances that the shield is intended only to protect NATO allies and U.S. forces in Europe against the threat of a missile or two from Iran. Instead, in a series of belligerent moves, Russia has tested a long-range multiple-warhead missile, the RS-24, which it says is designed to overcome missile defenses.
If Poland and the Czech Republic go ahead, Putin declared, “We will have to have new targets in Europe.“
The escalating spat is about far more than the missile shield. It is part of Putin’s authoritarian efforts to reassert Russian power, particularly because Russian oil has left the country richer and no longer in debt to Western lenders.
Putin is smarting from Russia’s loss of superpower status. Poland and the Czech Republic were once under Soviet control. Now, they’re NATO members. Non-violent democratic revolutions with an anti-Russian tinge, most recently in the Ukraine and Georgia, each of which borders Russia, are further encroaching. So some Soviet-style bluster serves his interests and perhaps salves his ego, as well as his nation’s.
His arguments against the missile shield are disingenuous. Accused by Bush and others of rolling back democracy in Russia, for example, Putin retorted that he is the world’s only “absolute and pure democrat.“ He recently compared the United States to Hitler’s Germany.
The best response to Putin’s petulance is to firmly but calmly work to reassure him and bring him on board on a range of mutual challenges.
One possibility is to take up an old Putin proposal to work on new arms treaties.
The Cold War is indeed over. To ensure it stays that way, Putin’s psyche needs thoughtful attention--starting with the summit in Germany and continuing when Putin visits Bush in Maine next month.
USATODAY.COM

Prince Bandar bin Sultan

Selling arms to a country such as Saudi Arabia--an oil-rich, absolute monarchy that spends three times the developing country average on its military and does not distinguish between public budget and privy purse--is hugely profitable.
Allegations by the BBC and Guardian newspaper that BAE Systems paid £1bn to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, son of the Saudi defence minister and crown prince, for facilitating the £43bn Al-Yamamah deal, Britain’s biggest export order, may indicate just how profitable.
What the allegations certainly show is that last year’s decision by the government of Tony Blair, to pull the plug on a two-year investigation into alleged kickbacks in the deal, has not so much buried the story as put it in a goldfish bowl.
There is a distinction to be made, at least in British law, between the ethics and legality of this secretive deal. If the alleged payments were made, but did not continue beyond the 2002 change in UK law criminalising secret commissions to foreign officials, BAE is probably right to claim it has broken no law--especially since the Ministry of Defence has been involved from the first.
But that does not justify in any way the peremptory ending of the Serious Fraud Office inquiry last December, after threats from a faction of the Saudi royal family that a further multibillion-pound contract for 72 Eurofighter Typhoons would be jeopardised if it continued.
The government’s excuse, that national security was at risk if the probe continued, always seemed specious. Mr Blair’s comments yesterday Ð that alongside the “complete wreckage“ of relations with the Saudis “we would have lost thousands and thousands of British jobs“--make it seem more so. The remarks suggest the decision was commercial--and as such subject to the anti-bribery convention of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to which the UK is party.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, will surely raise an eyebrow today when Mr Blair talks “frankly“ to him about the rule of law and the sanctity of contracts. Just as Thabo Mbeki, the South African leader, has wondered why the UK is pursuing BAE bribery allegations in his country but not Saudi Arabia.
The stench of hypocrisy in this afðfair is overpowering. It can only be dispelled by a thorough judicial inquiry. The Tory opposition will not call for one: Al-Yamaðmah was one of Margaret Thatðcher’s greatest coups. This is a perfect opportunity for Gordon Brown as incoming prime minister to distance himself from Mr Blair and reðstore some ethical shine to this government.
FT.COM

By curbing the electronic media through an ordinance, President General Pervez Musharraf has put an end to an era that he ushered in himself, that of free reporting and free discussion.
Now only the Taliban in their seized territories in Pakistan will be able to operate because he has lost the war for FM radio waves there.
Clearly, in the absence of success in so many areas, he needed a victory somewhere. The gag ordinance has given him that victory, albeit a pyrrhic one.
The Pakistan Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) Ordinance, 2002, had empowered PEMRA to 1) seize the broadcast or distribution service equipment of channels; 2) seal their offices; and 3) suspend their licences if they operate “illegally“ or violate PEMRA rules. The new ordinance, called the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Amendment) Ordinance, 2007, withdraws parts of the original charter that guides PEMRA, and deprives the media of the right to be heard at a Council of Complaints before being punished for violations.
As if that was not enough, PEMRA is now allowed by the ordinance to make new laws “on the hoof“, as it were, without informing parliament.
PEMRA was conceived as an independent authority and was supposed to rely, because of its autonomy, on legal tolerance of the kind of freedom which the electronic media needs all over the world to remain alive. Unlike the information ministry, it was to focus more on the correctness of the manner of conveying the truth rather than its political aspects as they affected the government in power.
However, without even pretending to cover it with fig-leaf legislation, the government had already put PEMRA under the information ministry as it concentrated on the difficult task of salvaging the presidential image a few months ahead of General Musharraf’s controversial re-election.
Pakistan’s media freedom has thus been immolated on the altar of “damage-control“.
No one in the world supports this backsliding on the part of President Musharraf.
Within the ruling party, there is turmoil which has not been put down even by swearing the cabinet to silence, as reported by a vice president of the PML, Mr Kabir Wasti, in a TV interview which was shut down by PEMRA while swearing it had nothing to do with it.
Also shut down was a discussion on the book “Military Inc“ authored by Ayesha Siddiqa in which the army spokesman ironically defended his case rather well.
The gag laws are double-edged. While doing nothing to enhance the image of the government, they deprive it of the right to defend itself.
Mr Wasti did the damage that democracy normally absorbs through free discussion. He said that President Musharraf fired the chief justice without consulting the ruling party, that party president and secretary general, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Syed Mushahid Hussain, were called in by the president only when he had to “task them“ with his new policies, and that the entire party and the cabinet were in the grip of despondency.
Mr Wasti emphasised that President Musharraf should stop insisting on being elected before the general election with his uniform intact.
Since most of the channels are in their embryonic stage, with millions at risk, taking them off the air through the police- and intelligence-leveraged pressure on the cable operators means asphyxiating them in short order. Therefore the media is compelled to fall in line and concede “victory“ to the great general.
In fact, if you see what Fazlullah, son of Sufi Muhammad, the Taliban mullah of Malakand is doing in the provincially administered tribal areas of Dir and Swat, the sovereignty of the state has shifted to the man and his FM radio. He is in the process of building his largest-in-Pakistan seminary with $2.5 million, signalling another “failure“ of President Musharraf against the madrassas.
If media owners and journalists are not able or willing to challenge this obnoxious ordinance, their honourable lordships may wish to take suo motu notice of it in the public interest.
DAILYTIMES.COM.PK

Discussions about the general elections include the debate over the identity of the next president.
The connection between these debates and the other issue at the tip of our media tongues, the eventual military operation in northern Iraq, is uncertain.
The electoral debate includes questions about the party choices of important political figures, the eventual alliances between political parties and about the provisions in the particular circumscriptions.
Moreover the names and identities of the independent candidates who can obtain seats in parliament is a prickly debate in itself. Everybody understands that parliamentary elections are also about the presidential election, which means a double election is under way, although the presidential candidates of the political parties are rarely announced; just as plans, future projects and policies in different domains are not communicated.
It’s quite difficult to foresee the political actors’ attitudes toward the modification of the electoral law, the political parties law or the constitution, which nobody understands even by reading it.
The economic model proposed by the governmental party or its dissatisfaction with the systemic problems in Turkey are known to a great extent.
The same cannot be said about the other parties. Besides, the electorate is absolutely not informed about another issue which is maybe more important than the economy itself: democratization.
While talking about democratization, Turkish political parties’ terminology is varied because their concepts of democracy diverge.
Those who think that democracy is just the ability to have regular elections don’t see that they are putting Turkey into the same position as the Middle Eastern countries that organize elections for the first time, largely only because of international pressures. Those who think that democracy is the rule of the majority don’t understand that they are making Turkey look like the countries governed by elected majorities who eliminated political and ethnic minorities in the Europe of the 1930s.
Even though Turkey made its choice in 1959 about democratization and the rearrangement of economic life, and has tried since then to join Europe, the actual political debate is nowhere near Turkey’s European choice.
This fact, added to the perceptions of the democratization process, proves that the EU idea is not embraced in this country. A country that conducts accession negotiations must have made its political choice, which is the full membership to the EU. Transformation projects necessitated by this will change Turkey and will modify its traditional structures and relations.
This situation requires clear positions from the political parties that request to form the next government. The main parameter of the elections should be Turkey-EU relations. The electorate doesn’t know which party is against EU integration or why it chooses a particular stance.
There are many uncertainties about the EU policy of the main opposition party, which always affirms its wish for membership while finishing every sentence with several “buts.“ Furthermore, parties that appear to make the EU accession an existential problem have not shared with the public their projects and priorities about the negotiation process.
The EU accession talks will take a long time, during which many general elections will be held. That’s why it would be wise for parties to determine their positions right now.
Beril Dedeoglu
TODAYSZAMAN.COM

After nearly eight years of uneasy occupation of the province of Kosovo that NATO wrested from Serbian control by 78 days of bombing in 1999, the U.S.-led “International Community“ is eager to shift responsibility for the intractable situation to someone else. This may be done by imposing a false “solution“ that provokes either Serbs or Albanians, or both, into reacting in ways that can be blamed for the impending disaster.
The “International Community“, the contemporary equivalent of the nineteenth century Great Powers that carved up the Balkans in ways that led to World War I, appointed former Finnish president Marrti Ahtisaari to be “special envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for the future status process for Kosovo“. Ahtisaari’s task was to come up with something that would sound good to Western media and human rights NGOs. Neither international law nor mere reality on the ground were serious considerations.
Ahtisaari’s “Kosovo Status Settlement“ defines the future Kosovo according to the IC wish list. Kosovo, it announces, “shall be a multi-ethnic society, governing itself democratically and with full respect for the rule of law, the highest level of internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms, and which promotes the peaceful and prosperous existence of all its inhabitants.“
Kosovo “shall be...“ Not is. Because that description is about the exact opposite of what Kosovo is now: a poverty-stricken cauldron of discontent characterized by violent ethnic hatred, a political system manipulated by armed clans, a corrupt judicial system, and terrified minorities (notably Serbs and Roma) deprived of the most basic freedoms, such as being able to venture out of their besieged homes in order to shop, go to school or work their fields.
Not to mention broken down public services, an economy totally dependent on foreign aid and criminal trafficking, and massive unemployment affecting a youthful population easily aroused to violence.
Turning water into wine is nothing compared to transforming this failed province into a model democratic multi-ethnic State.
But that is the miracle Ahtisaari is announcing.
And how is this miracle to be achieved?
Albanian separatists seem to be convinced that total independence is all that is needed to turn their ramshackle province into a second Luxembourg.
But total independence is not exactly what Ahtisaari is proposing. Kosovo is to have the trappings of independence--things to play with like “its own distinct flag, seal and anthem“ (on the condition that they reflect the “multiethnic“ nature of the place).
It can join the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank--not exactly the key criteria of independence.
But according to the Status Settlement plan, Kosovo will remain under strict international supervision. Control will be exercised by an international bureaucracy run by the European Union and a military presence led by NATO, in three parts:
1. An “International Civilian Representative (ICR), double-hatted as the EU Special Representative“, appointed by an “International Steering Group (ISG) comprising key international stakeholders“, will have the power to “ensure successful implementation of the Settlement“, to “annul decisions or laws adopted by Kosovo authorities and sanction or remove public officials whose actions are determined by the ICR to be inconsistent with the letter or spirit of the Settlement“. So much for political “independence“.
These “key international stakeholders“ are, incidentally, self-appointed and do not include the country with the greatest stake in Kosovo: Serbia.
Rather, they are a reincarnation of the nineteenth century Great Powers.
2. “A European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) Mission will monitor, mentor and advise on all areas related to the rule of law.“
3. A “NATO-led International Military Presence will provide a safe and secure environment throughout Kosovo“ until Kosovo’s institutions are able to do so--which could conceivably be many years, or 24 hours, depending on how the “key stakeholders“ choose to interpret events.
With some name changes, this is the same sort of international supervision that has so far failed to combat crime, provide real security to minorities or develop the economy.
Diana Johnstone
COUNTERPUNCH.COM