The world is on the brink of a “robotics revolution” in military combat that will have profound social, psychological, political and ethical effects, says a leading US defence analyst.

Peter Singer, who headed Barack Obama’s defence policy team during last year’s presidential campaign, said yesterday that the use of robots for fighting war was growing exponentially.

The US had invaded Iraq in 2003 with just over a handful of unmanned aerial drones, and no unmanned ground vehicles, he said. Today it used more than 7000 drones in the air, and more than 12,000 unmanned ground vehicles capable of combat.

More than 43 countries were developing military robotics, including Israel, Iran, China, Pakistan and Russia, as well as Britain and Australia.

In 25 years, Dr Singer said,

“our robotics will be about a billion times more powerful [in their computing power] than today”.

Their use in warfare was a massive development in human history, he told the Lowy Institute in Sydney, via videolink from Washington.

“We are living through the end of humankind’s 5000-year-old monopoly on the fighting of war … The robots of today are the first technologies to change the ‘who’ of war, not just the ‘how’ of war…”

Dr Singer, who has just written Wired For War, warned that remote war-fighting could come at a high price, as nation-states would be unable to keep the technology to themselves.

Adversaries such as al-Qaeda were also likely to gain the use of remote war-fighting devices. And there were a host of social, ethical and doctrinal questions developing from the use of such weapons.

With robotics transforming the nature of warfare, it was risky, he warned, to

“make grand commitments before you figure out where things are headed”.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, defence policy, Peter Singer, Robot soliers, robots

Keeping Americans safe from further terrorist attacks on home soil was the greatest achievement of his presidency, the 43rd President of the US, George Bush, told the nation as he bade farewell in a final address at the White House.

In his 13-minute speech – in which he spoke robustly for his national security record and barely touched on the two wars he leaves behind – he was forceful in defending his Administration, humble about leading the nation, and gracious to his successor, Barack Obama, who will be sworn in on Tuesday.

Mr Bush sought to characterise his eight years in office as a struggle between two dramatically different systems – one led by fanatics with an oppressive ideology and the other based on the “conviction that freedom is a universal gift from God”.

As for the critics who have said he will be remembered as one of America’s worst presidents, and his disastrous approval ratings, he said: “Like all who have held this office before me, I have experienced setbacks.

“There are things I would do differently if given the chance. Yet

I have always acted with the best interests of our country in mind.”

He asked the American people to acknowledge that he was willing take the tough decisions, even if they did not agree with those decisions.

Much of the speech, delivered yesterday Sydney time, dwelled on his fight against terrorism after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the impact they had had on him and the nation.

“As the years passed,” he said,

“most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. And I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe.”

He said setting up a Department of Homeland Security, reforming intelligence services and increasing the monitoring of terrorists’ movements. And he had “taken the fight to the terrorists”.

Afghanistan, he said, had changed from a nation where the Taliban had harboured al-Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that was “fighting terror and encouraging young girls to go to school”.

Iraq had gone from a brutal dictatorship and enemy of the US to a democracy and ally.
He said:

“There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions but there is little debate about the results,”

“America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil.”

Of other criticisms of his time in office – his handling of Hurricane Katrina, the rising numbers of Americans without health insurance, the contentious exercise of executive power and incursions into civil liberties – Mr Bush made only glancing references or said nothing. Of the economy, he said:

“When challenges to our prosperity emerged, we rose to meet them. Facing the prospect of a financial collapse, we took decisive measures to safeguard our economy.”

He acknowledged Americans faced a tough time but said “it would be far worse if we had not acted”. He gave no indication that he saw his Administration as culpable for the housing bubble and crisis that followed.

Mr Bush also named as achievements his work in Africa fighting AIDS, the No Child Left Behind Act, which he said had raised standards in schools, a pharmaceutical benefits scheme for seniors, and lower taxes.

He acknowledged the historic nature of Mr Obama’s election:

“Standing on the steps of the Capitol will be a man whose story reflects the enduring promise of our land.”

httpvh://au.youtube.com/watch?v=TnHhKX-gG20&fmt=22

Technorati Tags: bush, farewell, final address, george w. bush, speech

THE US president-elect, Barack Obama, has confirmed that he will pursue a clear policy of engagement with Iran and press immediately for peace in the Middle East.

Speaking on the ABC News television program This Week, Mr Obama said he wanted to work directly with Iran – a country whose president has called for Israel’s destruction – to improve relations and halt a nuclear program that Tehran describes as peaceful, but the West believes is not.

“We are going to have to take a new approach,” he told the program’s host, George Stephanopoulos, in his first interview since arriving in Washington.

“My belief is that engagement is the place to start.”

Mr Obama said he wanted to adopt “a new emphasis on respect and a new willingness on being willing to talk” to the Iranians, while making it clear “that we also have certain expectations”.

The remarks suggest a clear departure from the often pointed and deprecatory speech that has prevailed between the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the US President, George Bush.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that Mr Bush had told the Israelis last year he had authorised covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons.

Mr Obama also softened his pledge to close the US’s controversial prison at Guantanamo Bay within the first 100 days of his administration, saying it was proving a more complex task than he had thought.

As next Tuesday’s inauguration approaches, Mr Obama has scaled back some of the ambitious time frames he set himself during the election campaign and immediately after winning the election in November.

The withdrawal of troops from Iraq within 16 months may be adjusted depending on advice from the generals; the economic stimulus package that he hoped to sign on inauguration day is now likely to take until mid-February; and the timetable on closing Guantanamo is likely to be more protracted.

Washington will be pre-occupied this week with two important issues: the economy and the confirmation hearings for Mr Obama’s cabinet nominees.

Hillary Clinton’s hearing, on Tuesday, is expected to be straightforward because she has been extensively vetted in the past and because she is a senator.

But not all the hearings are likely to go as easily. Republican senators such as Arlen Specter, the party’s highest-ranking member on the judiciary committee, have voiced objections over Mr Obama’s choice for attorney-general, Eric Holder.

Mr Holder, a former undersecretary in the Attorney-General’s Department, is under fire over his role in the pardon by the former president Bill Clinton of the millionaire Marc Rich, often cited as one of the most egregious uses of such pardons.

Mr Holder has admitted it was a mistake to support the pardon, but Mr Obama is under pressure because he has promised to ensure the Justice Department’s integrity is restored, and some Republicans see Mr Holder as a partisan figure.

There have also been concerns expressed about Leon Panetta, Mr Obama’s choice for director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Several senators, including some Democrats, have expressed concern about his lack of intelligence experience.

Mr Panetta was chief of staff to president Clinton and would have been part of White House security briefings, but has no direct intelligence experience in the agency or the military.

Mr Bush is also expected to ask Congress this week to release the second $US350 billion of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, after consultations with the Obama economic team. It is likely to include funds to help small business and to assist directly victims of foreclosure.

But many in Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, are angry at the lack of accountability for the first $US350 billion, which was used to help the big banks.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, iran, iraq

We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians. So here, too, George Bush has let us down. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He is smaller than life.

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 per cent of Americans will not miss him. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is, stretching from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship.

The one indisputable ability of his White House was to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is also empty. In what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.

Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection.

Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove, he has embarked on a Bush “legacy project”, as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.

To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as high-falutin’ as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short as the President is “not a big reader”.

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin is on the White House website: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results”. With big type, much white space and child-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?”, its 52 pages are the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished”.

Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began September 12, 2001). He gave it record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished the leading al-Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (of one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out emergency chief Michael “Brownie” Brown and Katrina).

But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revealing. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many exit interviews.

The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The President who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.

He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says: “People will realise a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says: “It was a repudiation of Republicans.”

“The attacks of September 11 came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview, as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of an al-Qaeda attack. But it was an “intelligence failure”, not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds”, that sped us into Iraq.

The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. “I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,” he told C-Span. “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul.”

With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. Bush failed because, in the end, it was all about him.

The New York Times

Technorati Tags: economic crisis, george w. bush, hurricane Katrina disaster, Iraq war, Middle East

The Iraqi journalist arrested for throwing his shoes at US President George W Bush has written to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki apologising over the incident, Maliki’s office said on Thursday.

“In his letter, he asks the prime minister’s pardon,” said press aide Yassin Majid, speaking of a note Muntazer al-Zaidi had “written by hand.”

Majid gave no details of the nature or content of the apology.

Meanwhile, the judge investigating the case said he has denied bail to the 29-year-old reporter for Al-Baghdadia television for his own safety, while adding that he is in good health.

Zaidi, who relatives and colleagues said acted because he “detested” Bush and America, is being held for possible trial for aggression against a foreign head of state during an official visit.

He faces between five and 15 years in jail if convicted, but only one to five years if he is found to have carried out “an attempted aggression.”

Majid said Zaidi recalled in his letter having interviewed Maliki in summer 2005 and that the premier had said “come back any time, you are always welcome.”

However, he said “Maliki is not thinking in terms of another visit (from Zaidi). Muntazer is now in the hands of the law.”

Investigating judge Dhiya al-Kenani said Zaidi acknowledged during questioning that he understood the significance of his act – a grave insult among Muslims.

“When he was asked whether he had acted on the orders of a political party or for money, he said ‘no.’ And when asked if he was aware of the effect of his gesture, he answered ‘yes’.”

The judge said the fact that Zaidi failed to hit Bush – who dodged the throws – could work in his favour.

Kenani said he “refused the request for the release on bail of Muntazer al-Zaidi for the sake of the investigation and for his own security.”

If Zaidi were “out on bail, there would be a risk of homemade bombs or attacks. And there would be journalists who would go after him.”

He said Zaidi has “signs of blows to the face” but is otherwise in good health and does not appear to have a broken arm as reported by his brother.

The judge said Zaidi was injured “when he was being arrested, not afterwards,” rejecting suggestions he had been beaten in custody. “He was not beaten during interrogation.”

The judge, who interviewed Zaidi for four hours on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, made no comment on claims of broken ribs or an injured leg.

Technorati Tags: bush, iraq, shoes

Thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets to demand the release of a reporter who threw his shoes at President George W Bush.

The protests came as suicide bombers and gunmen targeted Iraqi police, plus US-allied Sunni guards and civilians, in a series of attacks on Monday that killed at least 17 people and wounded more than a dozen others, officials said.

The journalist, Muntadhar al-Zeidi, was being held by Iraqi security on Monday and interrogated about whether anybody had paid him to throw his shoes at Bush during a press conference on Sunday in Baghdad, said an Iraqi official.

He was also being tested for alcohol and drugs, and his shoes were being held as evidence, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media.

Showing the sole of your shoe to someone in the Arab world is a sign of extreme disrespect, and throwing your shoes is even worse.

Iraqis whacked a statue of Saddam with their shoes after US Marines toppled it to the ground after the 2003 US-led invasion.

Al-Zeidi was immediately wrestled to the ground after throwing the shoes, by Iraqi security guards. But the incident raised fears of a security lapse in the heavily guarded Green Zone where the press conference took place. Reporters were repeatedly searched and asked to show identification before entering the compound, which houses al-Maliki’s office and the US Embassy.

Many are fed up with US policy and still angry over Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein.

Wafa Khayat, 48, a doctor in the West Bank town of Nablus, called the attack “a message to Bush and all the US policy makers that they have to stop killing and humiliating people”.

In Jordan, a strong US ally, a 42-year-old businessman, Samer Tabalat, praised al-Zeidi as “the man. … He did what Arab leaders failed to do”.

Al-Zeidi’s TV station, Al-Baghdadia, repeatedly aired pleas to release the reporter on Monday, while showing footage of explosions and playing background music that denounced the US military presence in Iraq.

“We have all been mobilised to work on releasing him,” said Abdel-Hameed al-Sayeh, the manager of Al-Baghdadia in Cairo, where the station is based.

Technorati Tags: george w. bush, iraq, shoe hurling journalist, shoe thrower

Former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials are responsible for abuse of detainees in US custody, a bipartisan Senate report says.

“Rumsfeld’s authorisation of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there” and “influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques … in Afghanistan and Iraq,” the report released on Thursday concluded.

It said Rumsfeld authorised harsh interrogation techniques on December 2, 2002 at the US prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, although he ruled them out a month later.

“The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees,” said Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee that produced the report.

“Attempts by senior officials to pass the buck to low-ranking soldiers while avoiding any responsibility for abuses are unconscionable.”

The committee focused much of its nearly two-year investigation on the Defence Department’s use of controversial interrogation techniques, including stress positions, forced nudity, sleep deprivation and waterboarding, or simulated drowning.

“Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies and compromised our moral authority,” said the report, most of which remained classified.

The coercive techniques first originated from a memo President George Bush signed on February 7, 2002, that declared the Geneva Convention’s norms for humane treatment of prisoners did not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees, according to the report.

Top administration officials, including then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, participated in meetings on the harsh interrogation techniques, the report said.

The Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training techniques, designed to teach US troops how to resist enemy interrogations, were the template for detainee interrogation.

The report, approved unanimously by voice vote last month in the committee, found it “particularly troubling” for senior officials to have approved the use of techniques “modelled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to elicit false confessions from US military personnel.”

The adoption of SERE techniques was “inexcusable,” said Senator John McCain of Arizona, a ranking Republican on the committee and a former prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“These policies are wrong and must never be repeated.”

McCain lost the US presidential election last month to Barack Obama, who has vowed to close the Us “war on terror” prison in Guantanamo Bay.

AFP

Technorati Tags: abuse report, Bush Administration, Donald Rumsfeld

Approaching the November 4 US presidential election, Joe Biden confided that America’s enemies would quickly test an elected Barack Obama.
“Mark my words,”

Obama’s running mate warned all too presciently,

“it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.”

“Watch. We’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

Almost on cue, terrorists last week snuck into Mumbai and temporarily crippled India’s largest city, targeting Americans, Israelis and Britons. One consequence is the heightened focus on the quality of Obama’s national security team, particularly his choice of secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Announcing her appointment this week, Obama gave Clinton a “to do” list that was a depressing reminder of Bush administration failures on the global stage:

• Two unfinished wars, old conflicts such as the Middle East no closer to resolution
• Newly assertive powers such as Iran putting pressure on the system

• Proliferation of nuclear bombs.

The president-elect then introduced Clinton as a tough campaign opponent of “extraordinary intelligence” and “a remarkable work ethic“. She will need both.

Steve Clemons, a director at the New America Foundation, says:

“Clinton will be playing on a three-level chess board. There’s the international economic crisis which will have foreign policy ramifications; there’s the 21st century issues of global justice such as refugees, poverty and genocide; and there’s the big strategic threats – the US has to have some new strategic plan other than walling itself off from those nations it doesn’t like or using its military power.”

Clemons says the former first lady’s first task will be in getting a

“quick makeover, to show she can work at multiple levels and that she can work in shades of grey”.

In campaign combat for the Democratic nomination, Obama and Clinton offered headline-grabbing policies short on detail. Clinton was particularly strident, threatening to “totally obliterate” Iran if it used nuclear weapons against Israel.
She was admonished by Obama:

“It’s important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we’re shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we’ve seen out of George Bush. And this kind of language is not helpful.”

He now has faith that Clinton has the deftness necessary for America’s second most important job.
Her first challenge will be making sure the immediate does not overwhelm the important.
Until Mumbai, her talks with India and Pakistan probably would have been dominated by issues of Islamic extremism, the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan, aid aimed at winning over the next generation of potential jihadists, and nuclear non-proliferation.

“sent tremors down the San Andreas fault of the region by inflaming relations between two nuclear-armed countries”

“This is going to take up a lot of Condi’s [current secretary of state Condoleeza Rice's] time and the new administration’s time.” And it won’t end there. “Different terrorist groups will be contriving challenges.” Even allies such as Israel might seek to test Obama. “These things do not travel in straight lines,” Clemons says.

“The challenge will be trying to achieve longer term outcomes instead of being caught being reactive to every situation.”

Iraq and Afghanistan:

The new team’s first and largest challenge will be the exit from Iraq and the adequate resourcing of Afghanistan – Obama’s “central front in the war on terrorism”. Their effectiveness is likely to be measured by success in Afghanistan, and experts argue that could be more elusive than in Iraq. “Afghanistan may be the ‘good war’, but it is also the harder war,” David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer who until recently was Rice’s senior adviser on counterinsurgency issues, told The New York Times this week.

Most military experts warn that suppressing violence in Afghanistan – which had more insurgent attacks than Iraq between August and October – will not be as straightforward as it was in Iraq. The Afghan insurgency is rural, not concentrated in cities as in Iraq; the terrain is forbidding, tribal loyalties dispersed, warlords rich from narcotics and the Taliban and al-Qaeda receive relatively easy sanction in neighbouring Pakistan.

The Afghan army is tiny compared to population, Afghan police are ineffectual and there is little history of effective central government. In Iraq, centralised government was the norm. Building up a local force to step in when US and NATO forces have secured an area is therefore much more difficult.

Hamid Karzai’s weak government faces an election next year, making it difficult to replicate the “bottom up” strategy in Iraq, where tribal leaders were convinced to put down their arms and work with government, often in exchange for payments. In Afghanistan they wait for the government to fall.

Much of the responsibility for the redeployment of resources will fall to the Defence secretary Robert Gates but inevitably Clinton will be deeply involved, particularly in managing the relationship with Pakistan. She must extract greater Pakistani cooperation in removing terrorists’ safe havens or confront an even more difficult relationship should Obama make good his threat of unilateral action on Pakistani soil. Rising tension between India and Pakistan complicates the picture.

Middle East and Iran:

The Bush administration’s preoccupation with Iraq distracted it from the much larger problems of the Middle East, which have festered over the past eight years and become more complex thanks to Iran’s push for nuclear weapons. The Brookings Institute’s Martin Indyk says Obama must reprioritise and reorient US policy toward the Middle East: “For the past six years that policy has been dominated by Iraq. This need not, and should not be the case.”

Indyk says the priority should be curtailing Iran’s nuclear program and promoting peace between Israel, its Arab neighbours and Iran.

Others question whether US containment of Iran will work. Scholars such as Vali Nasr from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy argue the solution lies in a far more sophisticated understanding of the Arab stakeholders, and their inclusion in an American-sponsored regional security structure. Others talk of the need for a “grand bargain”, where the various causes of Middle East friction – disputed territory between Israel and Palestine, issues with Lebanon and Syria, a nuclear Iran, relations with Hezbollah and Hammas – are all on the table.

Restarting a serious effort toward Middle East peace is almost certain to fall mostly to Clinton, although the National Security Adviser, the former NATO commander General Jim Jones, is also likely to play an important role.

Clinton must judge how and at what level she engages with Iran, as Obama says he wants to do. The near-success in the six-party talks with North Korea have given the idea of diplomatic engagement with Iran more street cred. But it demands a rethink in how to deal with Iran, which could unnerve Israel. The North Korea talks made progress because threats of further sanctions and military intervention were matched with serious offers of assistance for the beleaguered nation including delisting of its American-imposed status as an “axis of evil” state. Iran may need more credible carrots and sticks, too.

Russian relations:

Nuclear proliferation:

An early issue for negotiation with the Russians, it was cited frequently by Obama as an area of priority.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty deals with weapons reduction by the two former nuclear superpowers and is due to expire in a year. Without renewal, the regime of verification goes out the window, says Matthew Bunn, of the Kennedy school of government at Harvard. “The issue for the incoming administration is whether to extend the treaty for a year, or try and push through a really good follow-on treaty. That, of course, is inextricably linked to the missile defence issue.”

Broader non-proliferation issues have gathered urgency as a result of Bush’s intrangience on treaty issues: the nuclear non-proliferation treaty expires in 2010 and is in desperate need of overhaul. Much work is to be done on securing nuclear materials around the world and Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions remain.

Poverty, refugees and Darfur:

Obama spent the past year promising to tackle the tragedy in Darfur and direct American moral authority against poverty, AIDS and genocide. Invariably, these pledges drew huge cheers from supporters who saw his emphasis on these big picture issues as one of the main reasons for preferring him over Clinton.

Now, delivering on the promise falls to Clinton and Susan Rice – Obama’s nominee as UN Ambassador, and a former undersecretary on African affairs at the US State Department.

The stakes are high for this security team – politically as well as the risks each area of tension could unleash. Obama has raised expectations of his ability to put America on a different course; now he must deliver.

Clemons suggests he will be better off if his national security team operates outside the limelight. “They need to manufacture Nixon goes to China-type moments for Obama,” he says.

But can that really be Hillary Rodham Clinton’s modus operandi? We shall find out soon enough.

China:

China demands American attention for other reasons, not least American financial dependence on Chinese borrowings to help it through the financial crisis. How America engages with China on regulation of international financing and climate change will help set the tone of the future relationship, as will Clinton’s and Obama’s handling of it.

“The US cannot thwart China’s rise,”

John Ikenberry, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, says.

“But it can help ensure that China’s power is exercised within the rules and institutions that the United States and its partners have crafted over the last century.”

But it takes two to tango and Putin’s Russia, enriched by booming oil revenues, is flexing its muscles again.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, China, darfur, hillary clinton, iran, Midlle East, mumbai, Nuclear Proliferation, Russia

A group of pranksters handed out more than 1.2 million fake New York Times newspapers mainly in New York City and Los Angeles on Wednesday with a front page story declaring “Iraq War Ends”.

The elaborate 14-page edition, dated July 4, 2009, is said to be the work of a group called the Yes Men, whose previous hoaxes include masquerading as World Trade Organisation officials announcing they were disbanding the body.

“It is fake and we are looking into it,” said New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis.

A statement sent from a website set up for the fake edition, www.nytimes-se.com, said creating the newspaper took six months and that it was printed at six different presses and then given to thousands of volunteers to distribute.

“We’ve got to make sure Obama and all the other Democrats do what we elected them to do,” Bertha Suttner, identified as one of the newspaper’s writers, said in the statement. “After eight, or maybe twenty-eight years of hell, we need to start imagining heaven.”

President-elect Barack Obama takes office on January 20 after eight years of the Bush administration and 28 years after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

The newspaper includes a front page story saying that “Ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reassured soldiers that the Bush administration had known well before the invasion that Saddam Hussein lacked weapons of mass destruction”.

The Bush administration has said it believed at the time of the March 2003 invasion that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was trying to develop a nuclear bomb.

There is also a full-page fake advertisement on page three from the world’s largest publicly traded oil company Exxon Mobil saying the company applauded the end of the Iraq war and that peace is “an idea the world can profit from.”

In a pamphlet handed out to volunteers when they picked up copies of the newspaper to distribute there was a “Frequently Asked Questions” section. In response to “who made this?” it said: “Who knows? Rumours are it’s a group of writers from several mainstream dailies — including The New York Times.”

The Yes Men, who were the subject of a book and documentary in 2004, have pulled off pranks including posing as Exxon Mobil and National Petroleum Council representatives to deliver a speech at a Canadian oil conference.

They have also posed as federal housing officials at a New Orleans event with the city’s mayor and the governor of Louisiana and promised to throw open closed public housing to thousands of poor former city residents.

But they are not the first to fake The New York Times.

According to the paper’s “City Room” blog, the best-known spoof was during the 1978 newspaper strike and the prank included journalist Carl Bernstein, author Christopher Cerf, humorist Tony Hendra and Paris Review editor George Plimpton.

Reuters

Technorati Tags: end of Iraq war, New York Times, prank

US President George Bush says that he reached out by telephone to his predecessor, Bill Clinton, before talks with president-elect Barack Obama at the White House yesterday.

“‘Bill, I’m getting ready to meet with the new president and I remember how gracious you were to me. And I hope I can be as gracious to president-elect Obama as you were to me,”‘ Bush told CNN today in a description of the call.

But the US president, who leaves office January 20 after eight years, declined to give details of yesterday’s meeting with the 44th US president following his decisive November 4 election victory.

“To the extent that he asked my advice and he may want to ask it again, and the best way to make sure he feels comfortable asking it again is for me not to tell you in the first place what I advised him,” he said.

Among things he said he regretted during his presidency, Bush listed the “Mission Accomplished” banner that served as the backdrop to his May 1, 2003 speech announcing the end of major combat in Iraq, where about 152,000 US troops remain.

“They had a sign that said Mission Accomplished. I regret that that sign was there,” said Bush, who also reaffirmed he also regretted using rhetoric some saw as brash, such as calling for Osama bin Laden “dead or alive”.

“It was a sign aimed at the sailors on that ship however it conveyed a broader knowledge. To some it said ‘well Bush thinks the war in Iraq is over’ when I didn’t think that. But nevertheless it conveyed the wrong message,” he said.

“It is good for our country that people have hope in the system and feel vested in the future and president-elect Obama has a great opportunity. I really do wish him all the best,” said Bush.

“It is good for our country that the president succeeds. The transition that we are working with him on is a genuine effort to help him be able to deal with the pressures and the complicated issues of the presidency,” he said.

Bush detailed how Obama, after their policy discussion, had raised “his little girls, how would they like the White House” and that during a tour of the residence section of the mansion “he wanted to see where his little girls were going to sleep”.

“Clearly this guy is going to bring a sense of family to the White House,” said the president.

“I know his girls are on his mind and he wants to make sure that first and foremost he is a good dad. I think it’s going to be an important part of his presidency.”

AFP

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