Qadi Hussain Ahmad, the leader of the fundamentalist Jamaat-i Islami called Sunday for massive protests against the coup of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. He was speaking to a crowd of 20,000 near the major Punjabi city of Lahore. I just saw Qazi Hussain on Aljazeera condemning Musharraf as a traitor, saying in English, “This is clear […]
Urdu Press Blames US for Crisis
While Gen. Musharraf maintains that he was forced to make his most recent coup by the threat of Muslim extremism, many of Pakistan’s Urdu newspapers have a different interpretation. They suggest in their editorials that the Bush administration’s pressure on Musharraf to move in an uncompromising way against Muslim fundamentalists sharpened the contradictions in Pakistani […]
State of Emergency in Pakistan
Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf has made a second coup. Over his eight years of military dictatorship, he had dressed his government up in the outward trappings of ‘democracy.’ He allowed (stage-managed) parliamentary elections in 2002. The same year, he ran for president in a referendum with no opponent, such that he could not lose. The […]
Female US Soldier Killed Bush Envoy Resigns over Unfair Policies toward Turks
Barnett Rubin at our Global Affairs site is live-blogging the state of emergency in Pakistan, declared by Gen Pervez Musharraf. My essay, “Combating Muslim Extremism,” is now online at The Nation. It is a critique of the approach of most of the Republican presidential candidates and contains advice for the Democrats on how to escape […]
Oaths, the Constitution, and the US Embassy in Iraq
The Bush administration is taking a hard line on dragooning civilian Foreign Service Officers into serving in the war zone of Iraq. The article contains a quote by Ambassador Ryan Crocker which says that the FSO’s swear an oath to serve anywhere in the world. This is not true. They swear an oath to uphold […]
Curveball is Alive
It isn’t surprising that Iraqi expatriates like Curveball should be trying to peddle a load of horse manure about Iraqi ‘weapons programs’ in the early zeroes. It is not remarkable that Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress and its US enablers such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Hannah, David Wurmser, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Michael […]
More on the Need to Close down the US Embassy in Baghdad
More on the need to pressure Congress to close the US embassy in Baghdad (see below). First, here is some correspondence: ‘As a retired foreign service officer . . . at the State Department in Washington, I would like to add to your rationale for closing the US Embassy in Bagdad to save lives. In […]
Time to Close the US Embassy
I don’t try to start an internet campaign very often, because the blogosphere has its own priorities and logic that are democratic and should not be forced. But here is a plea for everyone in the blogging world to help force congress to save our diplomats. Bush is trying to Shanghai several hundred foreign service […]
Anti-Gay Church Fined by Court Can Robertson be far Behind?
A jury has found an independent “Baptist” church (which doesn’t actually appear to have anything to do with the Baptist Church) in Topeka, KS, guilty of inflicting emotional distress on the bereaved family of a Marine killed in Iraq. The “church” (i.e. cult) members had protested at the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder […]
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