SAIS Professor Marco Biagi gunned down

SAIS Professor Marco Biagi gunned down in Bologna.

Headless body

I never want to hear another British complaint about silly EU directives. This one tops them all, so to speak. I don't care how those warm, flat pints of what the British call beer are poured, but to mandate that Belgian draught beer be served without a head in Britain should be grounds for dismissal from the EU. We should not give Baroness Thatcher the pleasure of pulling out voluntarily. And while we're at it, let's boot out the Greeks as well, for not being sufficiently on our side.

John Harper's thought experiment

SAIS professor John Harper has an interesting thought experiment. Imagine if the President of the United States ran his country like a certain major European country... At the very least, it proves the the US public's tolerance for corruption is a lot lower than in parts of Europe.

Sharbat Gula

National Geographic has tracked down the subject of one of its most famous covers ever. The beautiful Pashtun girl with bright green eyes could have been a supermodel here in the west; instead, she married, bore 4 children, lived through 17 more years of war and poverty, and wears the veil. Sharbat Gula's new portrait, when juxtaposed with the old, is just as powerful. The eyes are paler now, the veil is duller, the face fuller, the stare now more weary than defiant. Seventeen years seem to have passed so fast since I first saw the picture as a teenager in Sydney. I've often stared back at the original portait, and sometimes wondered where and what she was up to. The story is in the April 2002 issue of National Geographic Magazine.

Bless Colin Powell

Bless Colin Powell for finally stating the obvious:
"If you declare war on the Palestinians and think you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed - I don't know that leads us anywhere," Mr Powell told the congressional hearing.

In the meantime, whatís wrong with this statement?
On Monday Mr. Sharon told a parliamentary committee: "We have to deal [the Palestinians] very painful blows, continuously, until they understand that they won't achieve anything with terror."

It took a year, 310 dead Israelis and 1032 dead Palestinians for Sharonís policy to be plausibly discredited. When Sharon was elected last February, the death toll stood at around 150 total. The Pro-Sharon argument then was that he was going to increase security by hitting the Palestinians harder (all of you, mind you, not just the guilty ones). I said then that was a ludicrous argument, both in terms of causality and morality. What should be obvious to people who watch the region is that the Palestinians see themselves as desperate, and a portion of them are willing to commit suicide to hurt the other side. That makes Palestinian militants even crazier than Israeli hawks, and in a cycle of violence the craziest side always has the upper hand. Meanwhile, Sharonís motives are progressively being reduced to a naked hatred of Arafat.

Policy criticism should always include an alternative solution. This solution always was, and will remain, a policy of isolating extremists on either side. Moderates on either side have more in common with each other than with their extremist ends. It is in the interests of both the suicide bombers and the Israeli settlers to prevent a coalition of moderates negotiating a peace or even just a truce. But there are options that would frustrate extremists on either side: building a ìsecurity perimeterî on the 1967 borders and removing settlers from their provocative settlements; this would satisfy the entire international community, lead to recognition by Arab states, and stifle infiltration by suicide bombers from the West Bank. When it comes to the Golan Heights, it would likely have to become a demilitarized zone, under Syrian sovereignty but holding only UN Peacekeeping troops.