Nigerias big election questions on March 24, 2015It has been said, “Brazil has a future and always will.” This quip cannot be made about Nigeria. It has a future and it is working towards it without the mind-boggling mistakes that have been made in recent years in Brazil. Nigeria’s economy, the largest in Africa, has grown 11-fold since 2000, according to Goldman […]
The worlds growing disorder on March 3, 2015Is disorder the measure of our times? Can anyone see an end to the upheavals in the Middle East and what can be done? My answer to the first question is no and my answer to the second is: wind the clock back to the days of the Ottoman Empire when vast stretches of the […]
Eastern Europe is the opposite of Ukraine on February 24, 2015Economically, Ukraine continues to go down the chute. No other East European country has messed up its economic potential like Ukraine has. During Soviet times, Ukraine, with its industrial prowess and wonderful fertile soil, making it the Soviet Union’s breadbasket, was a success (by communist standards). Now, 25 years of political upheaval, economic mismanagement and […]
North Koreas nuclear bomb once again on February 17, 2015If there is such a thing as “frozen conflict” the best place to look is not in Eastern Europe but in Korea where, after years of merciless war that ended in 1953, there was an armistice, a line was drawn across the Korean peninsular and its two halves went their separate ways — one, the […]
Could it be the world is getting better? s on February 13, 2015We have much to be glum about at the onset of 2015, the latest being the killings by ultra Islamists of the cartoonists in Paris. But we are brainwashed with bad news: “If it bleeds it leads.” One plane crash is worth more airtime than news that we are winning the fight against early death. […]
Intervening in Muslim turmoil on February 3, 2015The beheading of a Japanese journalist does not represent Islam. Saddam Hussein did not represent Islam. Bashar al-Assad does not represent Islam. Muammar Gaddafi of Libya did not represent Islam. The regular beheadings in Saudi Arabia for ‘crimes’ such as adultery do not represent Islam. Likewise, the US dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki […]
Bringing peace to Pakistan on January 27, 2015It looks like the recent slaying of 132 school children by rabid Islamic extremists has finally brought a halt to the long time policy of Pakistan facing both ways. Pakistan, because of policies developed over decades by its all-powerful army and its intelligence service, the ISI, has long played both ends against the middle. On […]
Misunderstood fundamentalism on January 20, 2015In his book Faith and Power, Edward Mortimer, the former foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, when writing about Rishid Rida, the great Islamic intellectual of the first half of the 20th century, asked himself if Rida was “fundamentalist” since he was an admirer of the militant Wahhabi puritans of Saudi Arabia. “I do […]
Banning nuclear bombs on January 6, 2015‘Ban the Bomb’. When we were students many of us marched behind that banner, stamped with the now iconic image of the white outlines of a rocket on a black background. Even the ex-prime minister of the UK, Tony Blair, who later joined President George W Bush in going to war against Saddam Hussein, supported […]
A way out of the Ukrainian imbroglio on December 30, 2014The vote last week in the Ukrainian parliament was a seriously disturbing move; it has made reconciliation with Russia near impossible. The parliament voted to work for Ukraine’s membership of NATO, a red rag to a bear. The truth is this whole Russian-Ukrainian-western confrontation could be largely solved if the Ukrainian and western sides wrote […]