Free Republic

The farther Russia's tanks roll into Georgia, the more the world is beginning to see the reality of Vladimir Putin's Napoleonic ambitions. Having consolidated his authoritarian transition as Prime Minister with a figurehead President, Mr. Putin is now pushing to reassert Russian dominance in Eurasia. Ukraine is in his sights, and even the Baltic states could be threatened if he's allowed to get away with it. The West needs to draw a line at Georgia. No matter who fired the first shot last week in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia, Moscow is using the separatist issue as an...

Nicolas Sarkozy's plans for a Mediterranean Union will fuel Islamist terrorism and will be regarded as "imperialism" by many in Africa and the Arab world, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi warned yesterday. The comments by the Libyan leader are a major setback to the French President's Mediterranean project, his highest-profile initiative during France's turn at the European Union's six-month rotating presidency which began last week. Mr Sarkozy has invited all the EU's 27 leaders plus premiers from 17 Mediterranean countries to a summit launching the new "Union" in Paris next week. But Libya, which will boycott the meeting, has accused the EU...

The State Department, concerned about a "nativist surge" in Western Europe, has created a position to coordinate efforts to reach out to European Muslims and help them better integrate into society, a senior official said yesterday. Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, said U.S. embassies and consulates in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries will decide what exactly they can do, instead of "Washington bureaucrats dreaming this up." The growing Muslim presence in Europe is "a fascinating issue and one that the American government is just now trying to get its mind around,"...

Iraq will ask the United Nations to end immunity from local law for U.S. troops, the government said on Monday, as the U.S. military named five soldiers charged in a rape-murder case that has outraged Iraqis. In an interview a week after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki demanded a review of foreign troops' immunity, Human Rights Minister Wigdan Michael said work on it was now under way and a request could be ready by next month to go to the U.N. Security Council, under whose mandate U.S.-led forces operate in Iraq. "We're very serious about this," she said, adding a lack...

(English-language translation) [Guatemalan] Foreign Minister Jorge Briz expressed surprise yesterday over the attitude Belize adopted when it asked member nations of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) not to support Guatemala in its efforts towards [obtaining a] seat in the United Nations Security Council. "The Belize Ambassador [Assad Shoman] made the commitment to us that he would not lobby against Guatemala or promote Venezuela's membership before the members of Caricom," Briz told the Associated Press upon hearing the news about the Belizean government's lobbying with Caribbean leaders during the meeting held in Guyana this week. Belize and Guatemala are involved in a...

WASHINGTON, June 15 (UPI) -- The vast majority of Iran's Turkish, Saudi and Pakistani neighbors want the United States to accept a nuclear Iran, according to a new poll of the Muslim world. Saudi Arabia and other governments in the region are officially opposed to a nuclear-armed Iran, but two-thirds of Pakistanis, one-third of Saudis and more than one-fifth of Turks support the idea, shows a series of polls released Wednesday by Terror Free Tomorrow, a non-profit and non-partisan organization. Large numbers of people surveyed were undecided, sponsors said. A plurality of people from the countries polled, including a two-thirds...

In 2005, 71 per cent of Indians said they had a favourable opinion of the United States - a figure that dropped to 56 per cent this year. At the same time, however, while confidence in Bush's leadership stumbled in much of the world - going to 50 per cent from 62 per cent in the United States over the past year and to 30 per cent from 37 per cent in Great Britain - India's views of the US President climbed to 56 per cent from 54 per cent. The results come during a watershed year in US-Indian relations....

WASHINGTON: The United States has given New Delhi a go-ahead to test its Agni III missile as part of an overarching plan to groom India as a "junior partner" in the Indian Ocean region, the intelligence think-tank Stratfor has said. Washington green signal came during the recent visit to New Delhi of the U.S Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, following which India has announced that the Agni III testing which it had deferred would be conducted in August, Stratfor reported in a June 7 commentary. With the assurance that the testing would not affect the...

NEW DELHI, MARCH 29: The US is provoking an arms race in South Asia with the F-16 aircraft deal with Pakistan and at the same time offering F-16 and F-18 aircraft to India, alleged BJP. The party also expressed “great disappointment” at the PMO and the MEA talking in different voices on the US-Pak F-16 deal. Addressing a press conference here on Tuesday, former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh said, “The US is provoking an arms race in South Asia so that the commercial interests of that country’s ‘military-industrial complex’ are fulfilled.” He warned that India and other nations in...

U.S. Is Shaping Plan to Pressure North Koreans By DAVID E. SANGER ASHINGTON, Feb. 13 - In the months before North Korea announced that it possessed nuclear weapons, the Bush administration began developing new strategies to choke off its few remaining sources of income, based on techniques in use against Al Qaeda, intelligence officials and policy makers involved in the planning say. The initial steps are contained in a classified "tool kit" of techniques to pressure North Korea that has been refined in recent weeks by the National Security Council. The new strategies would intensify and coordinate efforts to track...

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in Luxembourg on the last day of her current tour, but German commentators continue to argue about just what her visit has meant. On Thursday, they seem to agree that nothing much has changed. Also, one paper provides 10 rules for mainstream parties to help fuel the popularity of Germany's far right. And just what, exactly, happened in Dresden 60 years ago? US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday. United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Europe has already spurred German commentators to spill great...

LEFT-WING billionaire and Bush-hater George Soros was not content to spend millions to thwart a Bush victory in last November's presidential election. Now his Open Society Institute in New York is joining forces with pro-Tehran lobbying group to promote the interests and the viewpoint of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In tandem with the American-Iranian Council, an industry-supported group that favors opening trade and diplomatic ties with Iran, the Open Society Institute will host Iran's ambassador to the United Nations on Thursday at the Open Society Institute's offices in New York. The talk by Ambassador Javad Zarif is benignly titled,...

The respected columnist Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald has gotten hold of a pretty seamy secret document showing an emerging alliance between South America and the Arab League. The 28-page draft document for a May 10-11 summit in Brazil will endorse Arab terrorism and condemn Israel. It would also 'study' the 'root causes' of terrorism, and 'distinguish' the kinds of terrorism they justify and the kinds they can condemn without consequence. We all well know what that means. Oppenheimer writes: My conclusion: South American countries are playing with fire by extending the focus of the summit to Middle Eastern...

China's feelings about the Bush victory Peter ZhangBrookesNews.ComMonday 8 November 2004 That Kerry's defeat is a disappointment to the regime is no surprise to China watchers. The regime regarded Kerry as a self-absorbed, vacillating, weak and an unpatriotic man with little or no character. Just the kind of man they would like to see as president of the United States. Unlike the majority of Kerry's domestic critics he was not seen as a "flip-flopper," far from it. To those schooled in Marxist-Leninist principles anything that serves socialism is justified. Therefore Kerry's continual reversals, rationalisations, lies and denials were viewed...

"It is outrageous and amazing," wrote Salama Ni'mat, a columnist for the London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat, "that the first free and general elections in the history of the Arab nation are to take place in January: in Iraq, under the auspices of American occupation, and in Palestine, under the auspices of the Israeli occupation." Outrageous and amazing, perhaps. Illogical, hardly. In recent years, Americans and Israelis have begun to learn a difficult lesson: thugs and despots, even those who smile, take your money and call you friend, are not to be trusted. Better to quarrel with a democrat than toast...