Yesterday the efforts to stop the bloodshed in Syria finally seemed to make some forward progress. The UN Security Council voted to send 30 UN personnel there to enforce, or at least to observe, the cease-fire that is supposed to be in place. That vote was even unanimous, meaning that both Russia and China joined in voting “yes” after many months of obstructing anything to do with Syria at the Council.

Then again, you might recall that “observers” have already been sent there, namely last Christmas and by the Arab League acting alone. Those observers then departed again in fairly short order, as the Arab League formally suspended its monitoring mission on 28 January 2012, citing “a harsh new government crackdown [that] made it too dangerous to proceed and was resulting in the deaths of innocent people across the country.”

Spiegel Beirut correspondent Ulrike Putz has little more confidence that things will be any different this time:

That Scheitern mit Ansage translates to something like “pre-announced failure.” The key is that, once again and by the UN resolution’s terms, it is to Syrian government forces that the security of the observers is being entrusted. As the December/January observer experience showed, that’s a clear-cut recipe for rendering meaningless the Security Council’s insistence that they be able to travel wherever they want, and interview anyone (individuals only) that they want without those individuals then getting into trouble.

There is another dynamic in play as well. That NYT article referenced above mentions the element of a full 250 observers, also with permission to travel anywhere they want, that was an original part of Kofi Annan’s peace plan, but implies that the Security Council will vote to up the total from 60 to that level of 250 soon and so dispatch reinforcements. But Frau Putz sees the current 60 (first elements arriving in-country tomorrow) as a replacement for those 250, not a down-payment. Furthermore, the Syrian government has won the right to determine the countries those observers will come from.

Finally, there is probably not much of a cease-fire to observe anyway. Anti-government activitists report additional bombardment of Homs; and government media alleges that its soldiers have been attacked.

“So the observer mission in Syria stands ready to fail, before it even has begun,” Frau Putz concludes. Then again, what does she know? After all, her report includes the damning sentence “Above the city [Homs] drones crossed overhead.” But the Syrian regime hardly possesses any drone aircraft capability.

OK, we know that a serious border incident took place yesterday between the Israeli and Lebanese armies. It involved some sort of tree [sic], and four people died: two Lebanese soldiers, a Lebanese journalist who was with them, and an Israeli lieutenant-colonel. It seems the UN Security Council has even gone into session today to ponder things. But enough of all that – c’mon guys, who started it? Who was to blame?

You’ll get no credible answer asking the parties directly involved: each was quick to blame the other and to warn of “consequences” should anything further of this sort occur. Israeli officials even spoke of their troops being caught in an “ambush.”

No, the best bet for establishing further facts would seem to be finding some report from an on-the-scene but neutral observer. And we have one, from the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, namely Ulrike Putz and her article Observers puzzle over the background of Mideast firefight. I mean, “Ulrike Putz” sounds like a name you can trust, right? She’s a female, and of course she’s German, and I think those two things combined amount to a mark of journalistic objectivity as good as any other.

Plus, you don’t have to scroll down too far in her article to find bullet-points that lay everything out as clear as it can presently be ascertained:

• Where exactly was that infamous tree at the center of all this: on Israeli or on Lebanese territory? A UN spokesperson is willing to confirm that it was on the Israeli side.
  
• So who opened fire first? We get UN testimony again on this: the Lebanese did. Then the Israelis naturally reacted, but by throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, e.g. artillery, combat helicopters. But I understand Israelis tend to do that in the face of a provocation.
  
• OK then: Why did all this happen? Well, there are some clues. You’ll note that among the casualties was a Lebanese journalist – well, what was he doing there just at the right place and time to watch something interesting happen? Also, according to Israeli sources the Lebanese brigade commander responsible for that sector is a Shi’ite with rather extreme anti-Israeli attitudes. So the suggestion is that he had just been waiting for an excuse to open fire on the IDF, operating entirely under his own authority. (Yes, I realize that with this analysis Frau Putz seems to go over to the Israeli side. But assessing motivations is the hardest task of all, and that’s the only source where she can get her information.)
  

Interestingly, up to now it has not been the Lebanese Army that the Israelis have felt they needed to worry about, but rather Hezbollah fighters. After all, they’re the ones that have the missiles to fire into Israel, and that month-long war there back in the summer of 2006 was really with them. So after the incident was over and the bodies removed, the real concern was that Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, would be annoyed enough with the incident (although it did not directly involved any of his personnel) to start attacking Israel again. Indeed, Nasrallah made a long and aggressive speech last night, in effect telling the Israelis not to try anything like that again or they’ll be very sorry, but that was as far as he went – so far.

Similarly, Frau Putz reports that the Israelis also seriously considered reacting to the incident by unleashing a general bombing campaign against Lebanese Army positions, but then decided not to. But don’t sit back and relax yet: this piece in today’s L’Express (with a couple interesting pictures of deployed IDF equipment) reports that both sides (meaning Israeli and Lebanese) are moving more troops up to the border.

Het Nieuwsblad, out of Flanders, has this piece on-line now about how the United Nations has finally gotten around last week to setting up its long-promised investigative commission to look into the assassination of the Pakistani politician and international figure Benazir Bhutto. You might remember that that actually occurred at the very end of 2007 – so one-and-a-half years ago!

Anyway, the commission will be headed by Chile’s ambassador to the UN, Heraldo Muñoz, assisted by former Indonesian public prosecutor Marzuki Darusman and the former Irish policeman Peter Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald actually has some experience in this sort of thing, as he was heavily involved in the UN’s investigation into the February 2005 bombing-assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Strangely, though, back then Fitzgerald and his UN staff were on the scene in Lebanon to begin their inquiries only eleven days after the crime was committed, and he issued his report the following month. I wonder what his private thoughts must be about the considerable delay involved here.

There’s another, more subtle problem present as well. Presumably, as was certainly the case in Lebanon, an important reason for this UN measure is the generally-accepted skepticism that the Pakistani authorities themselves could ever conduct a thorough and impartial investigation. The “whodunit?” here is simply too politicized; if you ask the government in power at the time (headed by former general Pervez Musharraf), you get the answer that the Pakistani Taliban were the culprits, but the current government (headed by President Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto’s widower) instead points the finger at Musharraf. Yet the Nieuwsblad article notes that commission-member Darusman has already indicated that it will rely on the current Pakistani government to bring forward suspects.

In all, then, this whole UN effort looks like a farce – one-and-a-half years is surely long enough for any murder-trail to go stone-cold. But the article also reminds us that, for whatever reason, the Pakistani authorities at the time made sure to hamper any proper collection of evidence, no matter how prompt, by thoroughly hosing down the site of the assassination just as soon as the bodies and the wreckage of the vehicle in which Ms. Bhutto had been riding could be removed.

Even as the remaining Somali pirate involved in last week’s dramatic hostage stand-off with the US Navy has arrived in New York to be put on trial there, further developments in the Indian Ocean have put the differences between the US and European approaches to the problem in stark relief. For last weekend the Dutch military and then the Canadians each captured a number of Somali pirates and then concluded that there was nothing they could do with them but let them go. As the leading Dutch daily the NRC Handelsblad reported in its coverage of the Dutch foreign minister’s visit to Washington at about the same point in time, these episodes contributed to some awkwardness in that encounter with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who noted that such actions were “not a good signal.”

Now according to a further NRC article, it looks like NATO has actually taken notice of Clinton’s remarks and realized that it needs to come up with something to fix this situation. (more…)

I know you might be busy with your Easter holiday weekend – but any chance you have been keeping up with the latest pirate-saga going on just off the coast of Somalia? The news from there could get very exciting, very soon, since not only the US Navy but also the pirates are reported to be dispatching ships to the spot on the high seas where a lifeboat from the ship Maersk Alabama containing pirates and their hostage, that ship’s captain, Richard Phillips, currently is in a face-off with the US destroyer U.S.S. Bainbridge. Meanwhile, around last midnight Phillips tried to jump out of that lifeboat and swim to the Bainbridge, but was recaptured by the pirates. There’s plenty of coverage about all of this in the various European national presses, but the latest article from the New York Times provides a pretty complete account of what is going on there as well.

The second-order discussion here, of course, is over what can be done to eradicate these dangerous maritime nuisances, who since the latter part of last year have become particularly audacious. If you have any ideas and are looking to get into a discussion, then you can of course e-mail me at this weblog, and/or you can resort to fora from the New York Times or the BBC. In the meantime, though, the Danish legislature (the Folketing) has an official solution that it would like brought up before the United Nations, as reported in Berlingske Tidende (Danish proposal should go to UN).

It should be no surprise that the Danes already have a solution to propose, for at least two reasons: 1) The Danes come out of an activist, Protestant, we-can-change-the-world-if-we-try culture that finds it impossible to encounter a problem like this and just shrug its shoulders and move on, and 2) They are heavily involved in international shipping. Indeed, that container ship at the center of the current stand-off, the Maersk Alabama, is owned by a Danish conglomerate, the A.P. Møller-Mærsk Group. The Folketing’s plan was drawn up by the Danish Institute for Military Studies, and it’s a fairly simple one, that starts with the establishment of a regional coast guard for the Somali coast, with start-up costs paid for by the UN, that can serve to warn passing shipping about the specific presence of pirates. But the second essential element is the establishment of some sort of court, with a firm basis in international law to be able to try pirates for their crimes. For one glaring problem is that, too often, Western naval personnel who have actually captured pirates have basically had to throw them right back, like fish that local gaming regulations won’t allow you to keep. We’ve covered this particular problem before here, and this does raise the question about – even if some sort of international court is established to try the pirates – who will be responsible for ensuring that whatever punishment that court prescribes is actually carried out? That point still seems to be a hole in the Danish proposal.

Anyway, though, a parliamentary majority is in place in the Folketing to send it on its way to the UN, although some doubts were expressed by the defense spokesman for the Danish People’s Party, who worried that sending such a proposal to the UN was the quickest way to make sure it got stuck in bureaucracy and went nowhere.

“What Somali government?” you might be wondering. I know that I did. That’s why the article in the Dutch religious daily Reformatorisch Dagblad – “Government in Somalia about to collapse” – turned out to be so educational, as well as directly relevant to what recent readers will recognize as my continuing concerns about what we’re going to do about all those pirates (. . . arrrrr, matey!).

The current “Somali government” is called the Transitional Federal Government (“TFG” for short). It was established in 2004, with backing from the UN, the US, and Ethiopia, but basically had to stay in Kenya for a while until the 2006 invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian forces drove back various Islamist insurgent groups and so enabled the TFG to set up shop in Mogadishu, the Somali capital. You can even see a picture of the current TFG prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, accompanying that Reformatorisch Dagblad article – so are you satisfied, doubting Thomases? He’s of course the guy on the right. (more…)

Arrrr mateys, I’ve suffered yet another keel-haulin’! I don’t know whether Christian Semler of Berlin’s Die Tageszeitung (which abbreviates itself on-line to “taz.de”) actually took notice of my recent series of piracy-blogposts (amounting to something of a mini-pirate craze, I’ll admit), but in any case he attempts to throw some cold water on my whole “James-Bond-fights-pirates” notion in his piece Crisis-Sea without Romanticism.

“Everybody loves the skull-and-crossbones,” he begins – hey, think of Errol Flynn, think of Johnny Depp! But we need to realize, he continues, that these pirates operating off of the Somali coast are not “desperate fisherman” (verzweifelte Fischer) but rather “a professionally-run business, run by gangsters and financed by serious businessmen.” (more…)

Sorry, the Olympics get started today, but that doesn’t mean that EuroSavant coverage will be dominated by them. You wouldn’t want that anyway, no? . . .

One aspect of the ongoing crisis around the alleged attempts by the Iranian government to develop nuclear weapons that usually goes unexamined is the attitude of Arab states, especially those in Iran’s immediate neighborhood. (Well, it’s true that the vagaries of the Iraq-Iran relationship have certainly received their fair share of attention – but let’s treat that as a special case.) Sami Al Faraj, President of the Kuwait Centre for Strategic Studies (all I could find on the Net was this), gives an enlightening interview to Der Tagesspiegel about the Gulf state perspective on Iran (specifically, that of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia) in the article “Against Iran Much Harder Economic Sanctions Are Necessary”. (more…)

Le Monde Diplomatique is the leading French opinion-journal on international affairs, but it is a monthly. The November issue was already on the newsstands at the time of the US election. So it’s only now, with the appearance of the December, 2004, issue on the streets and on-line, that we get to hear their reaction to the result.

Is there any doubt what that is? This is France we’re talking about here, after all, not to mention one of that country’s leading intellectual flagships. Anyway, no less than Editor-in-Chief Ignacio Ramonet takes up his keyboard to record the paper’s displeasure at the prospect of Bush II. (more…)

I missed this in the Financial Times Deutschland on Friday, and so now the article has retreated beyond that pay-per-view barrier. But luckily the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant caught it in time, and so passes along the FTD’s report that Washington is blocking Germany’s desired permanent seat on the UN Security Council (and presumably the veto that goes along with that). (more…)

It has finally happened, but you knew it was only a matter of time: the first Dutch soldier has fallen in Iraq, just yesterday (Monday). And the timing was significant, if only as a reflection of the breakdown of what public order there was in much of that country over the past few weeks. It might be even more significant when you consider that a decision is coming due as to whether to extend the deployment of Dutch troops in Iraq after the 17 July end of their current mandate there. Doubts about doing that were starting to surface in the Dutch legislature, even before this latest, fatal incident. (more…)

Whether it constitutes a shameful retreat in the face of terrorist attack, or an angry reaction to an incumbent government trying to twist the facts surrounding a national tragedy to its own ends – we’ve already covered all of that here, at least from the German point-of-view, and it doesn’t matter anymore, since José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is now the Spanish premier as of last weekend and the Spanish troops will withdraw from Iraq. What is new and interesting is what Zapatero and his Defense Minister, José Bono, promptly announced with almost unseemly haste just after assuming office: that they will withdraw those as soon as possible. You might remember that, in the wake of the 11 March Madrid train bombings and the victory of Zapatero’s Socialist Party in the ensuing Spanish general election, the new prospect of the Spanish troop withdrawal was at least couched in the fig leaf that such a withdrawal would be canceled if operations in Iraq were put under a proper United Nations basis by the passing of a suitable UN Security Council resolution. Now that fig leaf is tossed aside: the Spanish troops are basically outa there, and as fast as possible consistent with security concerns, meaning in effect in six weeks or even less. George W. Bush is not pleased.

Spanish troops now make up the third-largest national contingent in the Polish-assigned sector in southern Iraq – once thought to be a quiet backwater since the area is dominated by Shiites, but now containing some hot spots indeed, like Najaf and Karbala. (So reports Gazeta Wyborcza, without naming contingents numbers 1 and 2 – I’m guessing that those are the American and Polish troops, respectively.) So how do the Polish authorities feel about the Spanish action? Let’s take a look at their national press. (more…)

The US military may be present in Iraq on the open-ended plan, with no fixed terminal date, but that is hardly true of most of the other Coalition forces – including the Dutch battalion stationed in southern Iraq, whose deployment the Dutch Parliament (specifically, the dominant lower house, or Tweede Kamer) approved for only one year, until next July. As you can well imagine, that upcoming deadline for withdrawal evidently weighed heavily on Colin Powell’s mind on Monday as he met the new Dutch foreign minister, dr. B.R. (for “Bernard Rudolf”) Bot, for their first ever tête-à-tête “getting-to-know-you” lunch. (They had met once before in December at the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels. Bot is the new Dutch foreign minister in the first place because Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the previous one, was snatched up to become NATO Secretary General as of the beginning of December; his selection was covered on €S here.)

It’s a little early to be making definitive decisions about whether those Dutch troops are going to stick around for another murderous Iraqi summer (not to mention those murderous Iraqi insurgents – but there hasn’t yet been a Dutch casualty, knock-on-wood). That’s the opening message Bot is said to have delivered to Powell. That may also be why the meeting received relatively little attention in the Dutch press, basically getting it only from the top and the bottom, i.e. from the somewhat-tony NRC Handelsblad (Powell to Bot: Keep Army in Iraq) and from the popular-but-not-quite-gutter-press De Telegraaf (Powell to Bot: Stay Longer in Iraq). Ooooh, those headline similarities are spooky – but oh-so-commanding! (more…)

The big story is out there, the obvious one. Maybe you want the EuroSavant opinion on the capture last Saturday night of Saddam Hussein. I think . . . that that was a Good Thing.

“That won’t cut it, MAO!” perhaps you object. Ah, but allow me to remind you of what you could term the “EuroSavant essence”: It’s not necessary for me to pontificate on these pages. (Although that can also occasionally happen; actually, I feel another expatiation coming on now, but not on this Saddamned subject: stay tuned for the next entry.) Rather, my function is to lead you daily (or whenever) on a merry traipse through the motley landscape of one or more of the various European presses – a landscape in which, to extend the metaphor, the lay of the terrain as well as most of the bright and curious flowers to be found within it would remain unknown and incomprehensible to you without my (free!) services as surveyor, geologist, and naturalist.

Translation: I just need to find other writers, writing in one European language or another, to pontificate on the topic of the day, and tell you what they’re saying. Since Mr. Hussein was such a good customer of France back in his glory days, let’s see if the French press can comment on his capture in ways that transcend the obvious. (more…)

Yesterday marked the first day of the two-day Iraq donors’ conference in Madrid. I’ve chosen the German press as the prism through which to review events at and surrounding that conference; it usually gives good, comprehensive coverage, and what’s more, in this situation it represents a country which you suspect doesn’t want to be at that Madrid conference in the first place. (Germany’s delegation there is headed not by a political minister – the Minister for Developmental Aid, Heidemarie Wieczoreck-Zeul, might at least have been appropriate – but by her top civil servant, state-secretary Erich Stather.)

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung covers Madrid thoroughly, in two on-line articles, the lead one of which is entitled At the Construction-Site of an Iraqi Marshall Plan. (more…)

Today’s topic for a press review is of course the summit held yesterday in Berlin between the leaders of the EU’s “Big Three” – Germany’s Schröder, France’s Chirac, and Britain’s Blair. The subject on the table (but, as it turned out, not the only subject) was Iraq – where to go with regard to that country’s rebuilding process, what posture to take going into the crucial meetings around the opening of the UN General Assembly to occur this following week, and how to respond generally to the Americans’ patent need for a bit of assistance there.

You remember from our past discussion, here, that two of those three (Schröder and Chirac) already met last week, also in Berlin. Now, that occasion was supposedly not for the express purpose of meeting one-on-one per se, but rather to mark the first-ever joint session of the combined German and French cabinets in the German capital. That event had been planned in advance, but nonetheless it gave the two heads-of-cabinet a convenient opportunity to confer in advance of their meeting yesterday with Tony Blair, and confer they did.

What’s going on when there’s to be a three-way meeting, but two of the three have their own little meeting ahead of time? In such a case the suspicion has to arise that the thing has really metamorphosed into, in effect, a two-way meeting, between the already-met (in a posture of solidarity forged during their previous get-together) and the third, late arrival. And don’t forget yet another meeting still, that huge meeting later this week at the UN General Assembly, which will be attended by most of the involved heads of state, and which will be marked by meetings between Chirac and Schröder on the one hand and President Bush on the other – separate meetings with each. This three-way meeting in Berlin looks an awful lot like a training-session for those all-the-marbles meetings in New York. A by-now-common preparatory technique among politicians preparing for a big debate is to find a preliminary sparring partner who can best imitate the opponent that politician will face when he is later debating for real – could Tony Blair have unwittingly been fooled into assuming this role for Messrs. Schröder and Chirac, ahead of their one-on-one conversations with George W. Bush in New York?

Among the many English-language dispatches covering the summit, the Washington Post’s report ends by recounting the “embarrassing question” the three leaders encountered at their joint news conference: Was Blair seen by the other two as simply “Bush’s envoy to the talks.” Oh no, no, they hastened to answer – Chirac even magnanimously said “I want to pay tribute to the vivid imagination of the last journalist,” i.e. the poser of the question. The other common elements you’ll be able to read about in most all the coverage were that all three agreed that the UN must be given a “key role” in Iraq, but disagreed on how long it should take to do that, Chirac demanding that this take place “within a few months”; and they all at least agreed that “we all want to see a stable Iraq,” in Blair’s words. Nothing very radical there.

But the English-language press – usually – is not EuroSavant’s happy hunting-ground, nor are the common elements that everybody is reporting the usual grist for its mill. Let’s take a look at reporting and commentary from the host nation – Germany – to see what wrinkles and unique aspects of the summit are presented there. (more…)

EuroSavant veterans will recognize the following as the latest manifestation of a tried-and-true formula: commentary out of the German newspaper Die Zeit as reflected in Thomas Friedman’s column for the New York Times. I shouldn’t do too much of this, over and over – I don’t like to fall into predictable formulas – but lately commentary on the French and German reaction to America’s need for help in Iraq has come together in a propitious way, to include in addition a contribution today to that same New York Times Op-Ed page (and so in English, of course) from German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. (more…)

As an apt accompaniment to its coverage of all of today’s “September 11” ceremonies, remembrances, etc., the New York Times is also publishing a lengthy article by Berlin correspondent Richard Bernstein entitled Foreign Views of U.S. Darken Since Sept. 11 – basically about how the Bush administration within a mere two years has managed to squander all the sympathy and good-will that was being mind-beamed by foreigners in the direction of the US in the wake of the catastrophic attacks in New York and Washington. “Gone are the days,” Bernstein writes (towards the end of the article), “when 200,000 Germans marched in Berlin to show solidarity with their American allies, or when Le Monde, the most prestigious French newspaper, could publish a large headline, ‘We Are All Americans.'”

Things have reached a point, Bernstein notes, where “more recently” the French weekly Nouvel Observateur published an editorial entitled “We Are Not All Americans.”

That sort of mention always makes my antennae pop up and go “zing!”, and my fingers scramble to my keyboard to summon my faithful search engine. (Trusty “Geegor,” if you know what I’m trying to say.) Of course Geegor found this Nouvel Observateur article on-line, and a mighty interesting piece it is, too. Problem is (and, darn it, material in the Nouvel Observateur seems to suffer from this chronically), it’s written in French.

Hey! Hooya gonna call? Why, your friendly neighborhood EuroSavant, of course! Just look under the “Savant” heading in your local Yellow Pages!

Or, if you’re interested in what the French have to say, and you’re blessed with a connection to the Internet, you could instead click on “More…” (more…)

I’d like to follow up Tuesday’s treatment of the French press’ reaction to President Bush’s speech of last Sunday evening on Iraq and Afghanistan with a look at the Dutch press. Remember that the Dutch were rather more supportive of America’s drive for war with Iraq last spring than were the French/Germans/Belgians. Plus, the Dutch are already there on occupation, with a battalion-plus down south in the British sector, and have been since July. So did Bush’s address fall on more sympathetic ears in Holland? Nah – although at least there were fewer adjectives like “infantile” trotted out.

(For those of you who don’t feel like “going below the fold” to “More…”, tomorrow my ambition is to get reactions to the stabbing of the deceased Swedish foreign minister and euro advocate (that is, the common currency) Anna Lindh from my “Sweden-surrogate” – i.e. the Danish press. There might very well be something there to write about, or there might not: latest reports indicate that her attacker was merely your random lunatic, with no particular axe to grind (unfortunate choice of metaphor?) concerning the referendum on adopting the euro that will (or is supposed to) occur in Sweden on Sunday.) (more…)

Here we go! (Lost the thread? See the beginning of my previous post, i.e. of “Mon Sep 08, 2003,” as the peculiar pMachine software formatting puts it.) Plenty, plenty of commentary on Bush’s Sunday speech in the French press – let me try to cover as much as I can, in the time I’ve allotted myself (and it’s a generous slice, you can be sure, dear reader!) to write this.

Why not start with Le Figaro? My reflexive instinct is rather to start with Le Monde (“France’s New York Times,” and all that), but Tuesday’s print edition of Le Figaro irresistibly draws me with its big front-page, above-the-fold headline above the standard picture of Bush addressing the nation in the Oval Office: Qui veut aider Bush? – “Who Wants to Help Bush?” (more…)

Foreign reactions to President Bush’s speech to the nation of yesterday evening, requesting $87 billion more from Congress for Iraq and Afghanistan, are trickling in. Sure, they all report the speech, and it’s true that the subtle ins and outs of what they report, and how they report it, can be interesting and valuable in deciphering the trans-Atlantic point-of-view, but I prefer the “Analysis” or “Commentary” articles, and those aren’t there yet. I’ll check again tomorrow whether there is enough such material to report and comment on, from a major country (i.e. France or Germany – or the UK, if the commentary there is interesting enough to make it worth ducking the cat-calls and flying objects coming my way for “copping-out” with the English-language press).

Today, though, we prep that issue with some background, namely a recent survey on European attitudes towards the US, reported in L’Express in an article entitled Les Européens jugent l’Amérique (which of course means “(The) Europeans Judge America). (more…)

Today we progress towards fulfilling yesterday’s mention of current French points-of-view towards the Coalition troubles in Iraq. The on-line dailies are treating the subject hit-or-miss (see a review of a contribution from Libération at bottom). But what’s that over there on Le Monde diplomatique? That’s the sister-publication to Le Monde – of course – but it comes out monthly, and so with longer, “deeper” articles which are mostly opinion-pieces that take a broader look at current affairs. And on the front page of the latest (Sept. 2003) issue we have L’onde du chaos (“The Wave of Chaos”), an examination of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Bush Administration by writer Alain Gresh.

Le Monde diplomatique can be relied upon to lay out a “French” point-of-view carefully fashioned to be about as opposite to what the American administration would want you to believe as possible, short of setting up your own direct feed to Osama bin-Laden’s propaganda department. But stepping out of the confines of Fox News and the various other US media outlets which often are but thinly-disguised cheerleaders for administration policy, to be confronted with a foreigner’s viewpoint, is what this site is supposed to be all about, right? (Or is it instead about foreigners discovering the various innovations that make America great, such as Hooters Air? Or America discovering the innovations that make Europe great, like medically-prescribed marijuana? Just let me know.) (more…)

That bomb-blast in Baghdad that killed UN special envoy to Iraq Sergio Vieira de Mello also tolled an early end to this summer’s “silly season,” i.e. the period when nothing much of note happens. (Not that we had much of a “silly season” anyway, what with the thousands of abandoned elderly in France – and elsewhere – dying of the extreme heat at the beginning of August, an occurrence covered in EuroSavant here.) That blast brought into sharp relief the question: What to do about Iraq? Riding this theme in the typical €S way, yesterday I presented some reporting and commentary on that question from out of the Dutch press, and today I turn to the German. (more…)

I’m back now from Prague – and what a mess has arisen since I left last Tuesday, the 19th! That was the day that UN headquarters in Baghdad was attacked by a suicide truck-bomber, who caused the deaths of twenty-three personnel including UN Iraq envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

This is obviously a “gut check” moment. Things have not been going well there, and now there is this atrocity; do we stay or do we flee? Among other things, this warrants a check of the Dutch press to see what is being said there. (more…)

Reviewing recent EuroSavant coverage, one subject clearly stands out: Iraq. “Democracy in Iraq,” “It’s Hot in Iraq,” “Iraq Through Spanish Eyes,” etc. Maybe I should just change the name of this weblog to something like “IraqSavant” – is the .com domain name still available? (If it was, it isn’t by now!) I do try to avoid excessive concentration on one subject, or on one particular national press. But to a great extent what continues to happen in Iraq remains of great concern and interest, especially in August (the “silly season” or “cucumber time,” etc., when little else that’s truly attention-worthy ever happens, except maybe for travel accidents: crashing airliners, the Russian submarine Kursk, etc.), and especially now that more nations are being drawn into involvement, having generously agreed to assist the Americans and the British in occupation duties.

So here’s a change: How about a fairly in-depth treatment from the recent German press about what’s been going on in . . . um, Afghanistan? No wait, this is truly interesting, especially from the German point of view. You see, the Germans and Dutch last Monday finally came to the end of their six months of joint responsibility for the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), charged with helping Hamid Karzai and his Afghan Transitional Administration with establishing security in the country. So were there sighs of relief all around last Monday from the Deutsch and the Dutch? Not exactly: next to take up the ISAF baton is NATO, and of course both Germany and the Netherlands are long-standing members of NATO. In fact, at last Monday’s handover ceremony German lieutenant general Norbert van Heyst formally handed over ISAF’s green banner . . . to German lieutenant general Goetz Gliemeroth, acting for NATO! (more…)

A welcome antidote to the half-hearted support for Coalition (and particularly American) efforts in Iraq of Frenchman Georges Suffert, discussed in my last €S posting, comes from Germany, and specifically from Richard Herzinger writing in Die Zeit: Der Moralismus des Zynikers, or “The Morality of the Cynic.” The key fact so often overlooked by Germans watching from the sidelines, Herzinger claims, is that, slowly but surely, real progress is being made in Iraq. Rather than view events through “the eyeglasses of an anti-imperialistic resistance-romanticism,” as he accuses many of his compatriots of doing – or worse, actively hoping for failure there, so that German resistance to the war against Saddam Hussein can in the end be proved “right” – Germans (and all Europeans) have a duty to support the occupation authorities to ensure that Iraq is ultimately rebuilt as prosperous and democratic, a goal which lies no less in the interest of the Old Continent as it does of America. (more…)

It has been one hundred days since George W. Bush flew onto that aircraft carrier off of California to stand beneath a giant banner reading “Mission Accomplished” and declare that major combat operations in Iraq had come to an end. Nonetheless, events since then – such as the deaths there of 119 further American soldiers, and the continued survival of Saddam Hussein – have shown that the American engagement in Iraq is far from done. The Bush administration marked this 100-day anniversary both by releasing to the public a 24-page report entitled “Results in Iraq: 100 Days Toward Security and Freedom,” and by plucking the President himself out of vacation-mode at his Crawford ranch to speak reporters for 18 minutes (this according to an account in the Washington Post). “We’ve made a lot of progress in a hundred days, and I am pleased with the progress we’ve made, but fully recognize we’ve got a lot more work to do,” was his pronouncement.

Point – Counter-Point: Writing in Le Figaro, Georges Suffert gives an appraisal from the French point-of-view of what the Americans have accomplished in Iraq, and in that part of the world in general, in an editorial entitled Bush dans les sables du Proche-Orient, or “Bush in the sands of the Mid-East.” (more…)

The referendum dates for EU accession for Poland (7-9 June) and the Czech Republic (13-14 June) are drawing near, and will surely provide ample grist for the EuroSavant mill – soon, if not right now.

Right now, I’d like to discuss an interesting scandal raging in the Czech Republic. Interesting, because it reflects an ongoing problem for former Soviet block countries which have joined the NATO alliance, or which have been invited to or otherwise would like to, and also because it happens to implicate the current President of the United Nations General Assembly, the former Czech foreign minister Jan Kavan. (more…)

Today we treat the German view of the recent 14-0 vote of the UN Security Council (on which Germany now serves as a non-permanent member) to lift most sanctions against Iraq. (more…)

Yesterday the UN Security Council voted 14-0 for a resolution to lift the UN sanctions on Iraq that dated to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait of August, 1990, and thereby to grant allied forces now present in Iraq considerable international authority in the occupation and rebuilding of the country. For a while it had looked as if the Security Council would fail to agree on such a lifting of sanctions in much the same manner as it had failed to agree on authorization for the attack on Iraq, and with the same core of opposition from France, Germany, and Russia. While the American-British “coalition” argued that, with Hussein’s regime consigned to history, the sanctions’ purpose and target had clearly disappeared, so that the legal framework needed to be restored for international transactions undertaken for the benefit of the Iraqi people (most especially oil sales), these latter countries recognized that such UN approval represented the last leverage they had left to insert the UN and the international community generally into some sort of position of influence over what is to become of Iraq. There was also the issue of trying to head off any sort of cancellation of debts incurred by Hussein’s regime to their countries and/or companies of their nationality, and they were unwilling to make any gesture that could be construed as an ex post facto approval of the war that the Security Council never approved before it was unleashed. So French, German, and Russian diplomats and their political bosses in the past few weeks have tried to head off the lifting of sanctions by adopting the rather cynical pose that, after all, sanctions were imposed subject to lifting only when Iraq had been cleared of the presence of weapons of mass destruction, and that had not happened yet. (The fact that extensive searching has yet to uncover significant signs of Iraqi WMD could very well be important, in the sense of making a case for a certain element of deception having been employed to make the original case for war, but it has no relevance to the lifting of Iraqi sanctions; no matter what, Iraq clearly no longer represents any WMD or otherwise military danger to its neighbors or to the international community generally.)

But now sanctions are lifted, and by a unanimous Security Council vote minus the abstention of Syria – that is, completely lifted, and not just “suspended,” as had been a mooted halfway-house solution during the recent diplomatic stand-off over the issue. True, to get here there were certain concessions made from the allied side – e.g. enhanced powers for the UN special representative – but it’s unclear just how much of a sacrifice they represented in the allied position. Were there winners and losers here, or was a solution reached that was truly satisfactory for all? You can get the “allied” viewpoint yourself from your favorite American/British press outlet(s), but it’s EuroSavant that can let you know what they’re saying on the “other side.” As is my habit, I start with France. (more…)