Columnist.
Hortefeux had just announced the arrest of a group of Islamist militants operating in southern France. The arrests followed numerous reports that intelligence agencies in several nations had detected a plot, likely planned by al-Qaida operatives, to launch "Mumbai-style" terrorist commando attacks in major European cities. The reports mentioned Paris and Berlin as specific targets.
Chinese "workers are becoming harder to find and to keep," The Economist magazine recently reported. "Strikes have been unusual in their frequency ... their longevity and their targets ... ." The Economist argued this is ultimately good news for planet Earth.
Al-Qaida has always been a propaganda power. Its dark genius has been to connect the Muslim world's angry, humiliated and isolated young men with a utopian fantasy preaching the virtue of violence. That utopian fantasy seeks to explain and then redress roughly 800 years of Muslim decline.
The struggle for Turkey's political soul continues -- and Turkey's self-proclaimed moderate Islamists are winning. The struggle has major implications for the global war on militant Islamist terror groups like al-Qaida.
According to recent public opinion polling data, U.S. President Barack Obama is a highly controversial and divisive political figure -- public opinion polling data from Iraq, that is. In a poll conducted by Asharq Research Centre, a private Iraqi polling company, 42 percent of Iraqis said they don't think President Obama cares about Iraq. Sixty percent of the respondents claimed "it was the wrong time for a major withdrawal of U.S. combat troops."
North Korea's sneak attack at sea this past March, which sank the South Korean corvette Cheonan, provided a murderous reminder that the Korean War is not over. This continuing tragedy serves as a lesson in the difficulty of change, the limits of hope and the necessity of vigilance.
The Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait stunned Washington and the world. Within days, the Bush administration (George H. W. Bush) deployed American military units to thwart further assaults by Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard Corps and forge an extraordinary political coalition dedicated to liberating Kuwait. Operation Desert Shield had begun.
The Pentagon just released its annual report to Congress on China's military. Weapons programs got ink, especially its cyberwar programs, its expanding navy, ballistic missile projects. The report summarized China's strategic priorities as "perpetuating Communist Party rule, sustaining economic growth and development, maintaining domestic political stability, defending China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and securing China's status as a great power."
Medvedev chatted with an Abkhazian rebel leader, and then reflected on Russia's decision in August 2008 to "liberate" Abkhazia and neighboring South Ossetia from what the Russians insistently described as Georgian ethnic domination. "It was not a simple decision," Medvedev said, according to Agence France-Presse. "But time has shown that it was the right decision. The existence of the peoples of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was under threat."
NBC-TV's "Meet the Press" this past Sunday began the war talk of August. It's not quite the guns of August, 1914, but it ain't beanbag, either. When "Meet the Press" asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen if the Pentagon had a plan for attacking Iran, Mullen replied, "We do." He added, "Military actions have been on the table and remain on the table." Mullen tempered his response by emphasizing an attack is always an "option." Mullen kept his hypothetical saber stroke in a diplomatic sheath by emphasizing the U.S. regards military action to destroy Iranian nuclear capabilities as an "option."
