I think that Israel Prime Minister Olmert’s resistance to talk to the new Palestinian unity government ‘may’ be a charade disguising quite a bit of informal, off the books negotiations as everyone I speak to from the Middle East sees a deal on Palestine in the works — in about 18 months.
Yosri Fouda, an important Al Jazeera journalist who interviewed both Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, has written a very interesting note today in The Sunday Times of London on what may be driving KSM’s extraordinary admissions during secret hearings at Guantanamo Bay.
Folks, I have been off of email and the cell phone for five days as the ability to get on email was just too ridiculously expensive and difficult in Havana. I paid $8.00 to get to one unimportant email out of many hundreds.
What exactly did President Bush see when he looked into President Putin’s eyes? I recall he got “a sense of his soul.” After my post last week about Kommersant’s reaction to the death of Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, a couple of my Russian friends e-mailed me to tell me they were concerned for my safety….
Mark Lagon is one of the people in the International Organizations bureau at State who can play ball with high-level Bush appointees and still make the case for a strong U.S.-U.N. relationship.
There are a thousand reasons Nancy Pelosi might have decided not to push for a greenhouse gas cap & trade scheme by July 4, her timeline for global warming legislation. None of those reasons are compelling. I’ll be doing some fairly in-depth writing on climate change and energy policy on this site.
I’ll be watching closely on Thursday morning as Zalmay Khalilzad runs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gauntlet. Acting Perm. Rep. Alex Wolff has been doing, by all accounts, a fantastic job at the U.S.
Former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson taught me a term recently that I did not know about — the “non-paper” paper.
I’ve been in Senator Harry Reid‘s territory for the last day and a half — enjoying watching the unlikely co-mingling of a massive number of NASCAR fans mixing with tweed and tie-wearing academics from the Western Political Science Association.