Olmert speaks his mind

Over the past few days, outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has made some really remarkable statements.

Yesterday he said that Israel would have to withdraw almost entirely to its 1967 borders if it wanted to have peace with Palestine and Syria. In real terms this means giving back land in the West Bank, Golan Heights and East Jerusalem - all lands captured by Israel in 1967. Olmert said that this also means giving up nearly all of the West Bank settlements, and that Israel would have to swap land with Palestine at a 1:1 ratio for the settlements they want to keep.

It was amazingly free talk for an Israeli Prime Minister, even an outgoing one. The ideas of giving Israeli land for peace or abandoning settlements are always controversial issues within Israeli politics, so to suggest giving up all of the Golan Heights, and almost all of the West Bank is a pretty huge step. Olmert said that it was looking reality in the eye, something he was unwilling to do for the past 35 years.

"We have an opportunity that is limited in time, in which we can perhaps reach a historic deal in our relations with the Palestinians and another historic step in our relations with Syria. In both cases, the decision we must reach is a decision that we have been refusing to accept for the past four decades," Olmert said in a wide-ranging interview with Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. He also said that Israel was silly to consider a strike on Iran to take out their nuclear program, saying such talk was part of Israel's "delusions of grandeur".

Olmert's comments Monday came after he warned on Sunday of "an evil wind of extremism" threatening Israel's democracy. There has been an increase recently in Israeli settlers in the West Bank launching attacks against Palestinian villages and farms - including setting fires to farmhouses and fields and assaulting Palestinians. More radical elements in the Israeli settler movement call the tactic the "price tag" that Israel will have to pay if the government tries to remove the settlements in the West Bank. Basically the settlers will cause chaos within Palestinian communities, forcing the Israeli military to enter the area to maintain security, getting bogged down in the process. A prominent Israeli critic of the settlement movement was also injured last week in a pipe bomb attack tied to radicals.

So, while you have to give credit to Olmert for speaking freely and opening about some crises facing Israel, it also would have been nice if he'd taken these positions when he had the power to make them a reality (a point some of Israel's left-wing politicians have also made). The position he laid out though just makes sense - so long as the West bank is filled with settlements, the Palestinians can never form a viable state, and as long as they don't have a country of their own it's hard to see them as "partners in peace" like the peace talks always suggest; while the Syrians aren't likely to ever accept a peace deal unless they get the Golan Heights back. Then there's the demographic argument - if Israel keeps occupying these lands, because of the higher birthrate among the Palestinians, it's estimated that within a generation Israeli Jews could be a minority within their own country.

But on a positive note, Olmert did suggest that his probable successor Tzipi Livni would follow the same path in dealing with the Palestinians and Syrians when she takes power.

How the US presidential debate played overseas

The Christian Science Monitor did this roundup on how the first US presidential debate was received overseas; some of the reactions were interesting.

In short, Obama's talk about pursuing terrorists into Pakistan scared the Pakistanis while exciting the Afghanis, since they blame Taliban agents based in the border areas of Pakistan for causing trouble within their own country. Russians didn't like what they heard from either candidate - both of who took a tough line on Russia over the recent conflict in Georgia. Finally the debate got little reception in many of the hotspots in the Middle East - Iraq, Iran, and Syria - where the end of the holy month of Ramadan was a much bigger deal than the first presidential debate.

We’ll see what they think of Thursday’s vice-presidential debate.

Chavez says US needs new constitution

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez says that he has the cure for the woes on Wall Street - a new constitution for the United States.

Chavez blamed capitalism for the financial crisis and said that the US should draw up a new "truly democratic" constitution. According to Chavez, America is run by a "dictatorship of the elite", namely big banks and corporations that enrich themselves at the people's expense, and that power must be returned to the people.

"Let the US empire end and let a great nation and great republic rise from the ruin ... It's time to shout 'Liberty!' again in the United States," Chavez said.

Of course the US government accuses Chavez of running Venezuela as a near dictatorship and of silencing any political opposition, so they may not be terribly open to his definition of "democracy".

Meanwhile, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus said that perhaps Wall Street should look to the world's poorest people for idea on how to get out of this financial crisis.

Yunus has been called the "banker to the poor", his Grameen Bank helped to start the concept of microfinance - giving small loans to some of the world's poorest people to help them start small businesses to lift themselves out of poverty. With loans of a few hundred dollars or less, people in desperate poverty have been able to purchase items like sewing machines, or even a cow, that enable them to produce and sell products and earn a living. Yunus began his lending more than 30 years ago with a $27 loan to a woman in Bangladesh.

What's most amazing is that his Grameen Bank has a loan repayment rate of more than 98%. "Don't ignore them (the poor) ... we lend over a billion dollars a year," he said. "We have to get out of the mindset that the rich will do the business and the poor will have the charity," he told an audience at the Clinton Global Initiative.

A few random thoughts on tonight's debate

With an emphasis on "random", keep in mind this isn't a full review, though I think I may take a tip from boxing and score the next debate on a 10-point must system.

First thought? I was disappointed. The first debate was supposed to focus on foreign policy. Now with what happened on Wall Street this past week, it's understandable that there would be questions about the economy. Of course, the logical thing would have been to swap the topic of this debate with the topic of the third and final debate, which happens to be the economy. But that didn't happen, so instead we got a half-economy/half-foreign policy night.

Not that the topic seemed to matter much, both John McCain and Barack Obama didn't give answers to questions in the first half hour or so of the debate, rather they gave recaps of their stump speeches. McCain started especially slow, giving Obama an early advantage. When they did get around to foreign policy, a lot of the discussion was on the war in Iraq. And again, here they both seemed to stick to their well-trod policy positions and stump speeches. I didn't think there was a lot of new ground covered here. And I think that a big problem with US foreign policy in the past few years is that it has been so dominated by Iraq/the War on Terror that a lot of regions/countries/events have been ignored, so I was looking for discussion of some other topics.

In the end we got three: Iran, Pakistan and Russia (maybe there would have been more if the economic talk hadn't gobbled up so much time). In the Iran section McCain repeated his (dumb) idea for a "League of Democracies" to help deal with rogue states (I say the League idea is dumb because we need more dialog with the world community, not less. Remember the words of Yitzhak Rabin: "you don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies). For his part, Obama called a nuclear Iran unacceptable. They then fought over what the meaning of the term "pre-conditions" meant, going back to Obama's early pledge to meet with the leaders of countries like Iran without pre-conditions.

The discussion on Pakistan was the most interesting, with McCain making some good points, including the need to win the hearts and minds of the Pakistani people so that they would be partners in the fight against Islamic extremists like al-Qaeda. Obama again said that he would instruct the US military to conduct raids into Pakistan if the Pakistanis were not willing or able to do it themselves. The only problem is that the US has been doing this for the past few weeks and it's absolutely enraged the Pakistanis to the point that on at least one occasion this week their troops shot at one of our helicopters. Not a way to win hearts and minds...

The Russian section was predictable: both warned about an aggressive Russia under Putin and condemned Russia for attacking Georgia (ignoring the fact that Georgia started the conflict by attacking the South Ossetian city Tskhinvali). Obama said that he didn't want a new Cold War with Russia, but also committed a pretty sizable gaff when he said he warned about Russian peacekeepers on Georgian soil last April – apparently not knowing that Russian peacekeepers have been on the ground in the disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia for the past 15 years.

Perhaps Obama was lucky that the economy took up so much of the debate, he never seemed quite comfortable or confident talking about world affairs - promoting a policy that's causing problems with Pakistan, his lack of knowledge about the Russian peacekeepers. McCain on the other hand was able to talk about personally visiting the Pakistani border area Waziristan and the disputed (now "independent") Georgian regions of South Ossetia or Abkhazia (Mac didn't specify which one he visited), it did give him a certain gravitas that Obama lacked. Obama though did have a good point at the very end - that the United States involvement in Iraq weakened the country's capacity to project power abroad.

Was there a winner? I don't think a clear one. Obama was better in the beginning, but I'd say McCain came off better on world affairs. It is too bad that they couldn't have talked more on foreign policy since there are so many more issues out there: the rise of China, America's role in South America, our relations with Europe, the brewing struggle for the resources of the Arctic, North Korea, even a discussion of Russia past the sound bites and stereotypes. It would be nice if a few of these topics could make it into one of the other two debates, but I won't hold my breath.

Next up: the vice presidential debate next Thursday.

Early vote possible in Ukraine

Ukraine's Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko suggested on Friday that maybe Ukraine's presidential election should be moved up from its scheduled date in 2010, if the country is forced to have another round of parliamentary elections as a way of breaking the political deadlock that has plagued the country for some time now.

She also said she would like to reform a ruling coalition with President Viktor Yushchenko - though if you accept the definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, then it's insane to think that coalition could be put back together. The Tymoshenko-Yushchenko coalition has fallen apart twice since the two of them led a pro-democracy movement in Ukraine in 2004; neither time did the coalition last more than a year, and that was before Yushchenko accused Tymoshenko of treason, which he did earlier in the month. Kind of hard to imagine them getting back together.

Tymoshenko also said it was possible her party might look to form a coalition with former President Viktor Yanukovich's Party of Regions. That could signal a real change in policy for Ukraine, since Yanukovich's party is largely backed by ethnic Russian Ukrainians and is decidedly pro-Moscow.

For her part Tymoshenko says that she wants more "balanced" relations with Russia than have existed under the very pro-Western rule of President Yushchenko.

Pirates seize ship full of tanks

Yes, you read that headline right. Pirates off the coast of Somalia have captured the Faina, a ship heading from Ukraine to Kenya with a cargo that includes 33 model T-72 tanks and a cache of ammunition recently bought by the Kenyan government. It's unclear if the pirates knew what the ship was carrying when they boarded it.

Frankly it's hard to believe that a ship with a cargo like that wouldn't have some way of defending itself, especially sailing in the waters off the coast of Somalia, which has become a modern-day version of "Pirates of the Caribbean". Piracy is an epidemic problem in the Gulf of Aden off of Africa's east coast. Pirates are able to use the basically lawless country of Somalia (Somalia hasn’t had a working national government for years) as a base to prey on vessels traveling in the busy shipping lanes off the coast.

France has been calling for international military action against the pirates, and now, with the seizure of the Faina, the Russians are sending a guided missile cruiser to the area. Though since the Russian ship has to travel from northern Europe, it's doubtful whether it will arrive in time to intercept the Faina, likely headed to the Somali city of Eyl. And while piracy might be a problem for the world's cargo shippers, the BBC reports that it's providing an absolute boom for Eyl's economy.



Somali pirates typically hold the ships and their crews for ransom (up to $1.5 million depending on the size of the ship and the crew), and much of that wealth flows into Eyl, which has developed an entire economy build around the piracy industry. Some locals act as negotiators for the pirates with the ship's insurance companies, which ultimately pay the ransoms, others act as the pirates’ accountants, the BBC even reports that some local restaurants have been set up just to cater to the kidnapped crews of hijacked ships. In all piracy is estimated to bring in $30 million to Eyl's economy each year - more than the annual budget for the entire northern Somali region Puntland.

As for those tanks aboard the Faina, some security experts say don't worry about them - tanks are difficult to maintain, so they'd be hard to sell to a third party. The problem with that explanation though is that Somalia is largely run by different militia groups, I’d imagine there might be some local warlord that would like to get his hands on at least a few of them. The US State Department also said they're concerned about the tanks.

UN to pass "resolution"on Iran

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council (plus Germany) have agreed on a draft of another resolution condemning Iran's nuclear program. But, in a nod to Russian (and Chinese) objections the latest resolution will not include sanctions against Iran, which begs the question: what's the point?

The UN has already leveled three rounds of sanctions against Iran to try to convince them to give up their nuclear program - which the Iranians say is meant to produce power, and the US, Israel and other nations claim is really production line for atomic weapons. But Iran has brushed off the sanctions and plowed ahead with their program. Maybe it's silly to think that a fourth round of sanctions would finally convince Iran to change their ways, but its sillier still to think they'll stop their atomic program because the UN has passed a resolution asking them to do so.

Officials like US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to spin the resolution as a powerful message to Iran that despite recent anger between the US and Russia over Russia's conflict with Georgia, the US and Russia remain committed to stopping Iran's nuclear program. I doubt the Iranians will buy that. Really it would seem to show the opposite, that Russia - which isn't keen on seeing the Iranians build a nuclear bomb either – is not willing to work with the US on an issue that they basically agree on because of the sad state of US-Russian relations. And there's China as well, also unwilling to join the Western nations of the 5+1 group on putting in more sanctions.

More sanctions might not be the best way to deal with Iran. But it does no good for anyone involved (or the prestige of the UN for that matter) proposing them, settling for silly resolutions and pretending they're meaningful.

So what exactly did they bomb?

Last year Israel bombed a site in Syria that they (and the United States) said was a nearly finished, North Korean designed nuclear reactor meant to be the cornerstone of a secret Syrian atomic weapons program. But early results of testing by scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world's nuclear watchdog group, have not found any of the telltale signs of a nuclear reactor.

There are more tests to be done on the samples, but some officials from the IAEA doubt they will give different results from the first tests.

So the question is what was at the site at Al Kibar? One possible explanation is that the bombs dropped by Israel did not scatter nuclear material around the site; another is that the Syrians were able to scrub the site before the IAEA inspectors arrived. Syria is refusing to allow inspectors to look at several other sites in the country suspected of being part of a weapons program.

When Sarah met the UN

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is going to get a crash course in international relations this week when she hits New York City for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. While in the city she will be meeting with leaders from several of the world's hotspots: Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Iraq's Jalal Talabani, the newly-elected president of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari, Columbia's Álvaro Uribe and Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia.

Earlier today though, it was announced that Sarah would be meeting with someone who dwarfs them all - U2 frontman and world poverty activist Bono. I would just really love to be in the room for that meeting.

Palin's meetings will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain (remember them?) will face off in their first presidential debate on Friday. The topic of the debate was supposed to be foreign affairs, but given the ongoing debacle on Wall Street, we'll see if they stick to that format.

Changes at the top

The leaders of both Israel and South Africa stepped down today, in a rare resignation two-fer.

The end of Ehud Olmert as Prime Minister in Israel was no surprise. Olmert's approval rating has been languishing in the single digits for months now, crushed by allegations of corruption within his government (and even within his family), and blame for the month long war in Lebanon in 2006 that many feel strengthened, rather than weakened, Hezbollah's grip on power in that country.

Olmert's probable successor is Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who will take over the Prime Minister's job if she can form a coalition in Israel's parliament, the Knesset. As Prime Minister Livni could help move the peace process with the Palestinians along, which she supports. The peace process suffered in the past few months along with Olmert's popularity - he didn't have the political capital necessary to move the negotiations along and to convince his fellow politicians to agree to some of the tough choices that the process demands.

Meanwhile South Africa's Thabo Mbeki also resigned as president, a victim of political infighting in South Africa's all-powerful African National Congress. The ANC is the party of Nelson Mandela and it dominates South African politics. Mbeki fell out with the current leader of the ANC Jacob Zuma, who plans to run for president next year. Given the ANC's power in South Africa, Zuma is almost certain to become president.

But last year Zuma was accused with corruption and put on trial. The charges against him were finally thrown out last week, but the belief was widespread that Mbeki had pushed the charges against Zuma as a way of getting rid of a powerful rival.

Now Mbeki is out, and Zuma likely in. Mbeki took over for Mandela when he retired from politics and oversaw South Africa's recent economic growth. He was also the key mediator in power-sharing talks between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai in neighboring Zimbabwe.