US Ties Bolster Kazakhstan’s Soviet-Style Leader

Six months before scheduled parliamentary elections, the U.S.-backed government in Kazakhstan is harassing the political opposition, and undermining prospects for a free and fair choice, according to a new report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch (HRW). The...

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Pacification: Worth the Price?

Six years ago, in February 1998, I traveled to Iraq with a British Voices in the Wilderness team. The US was threatening another massive bombardment. We decided to go to Fallujah in hopes of better understanding the perspective of people whose marketplace had been...

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The New Saddam

With Saddam captured, and the U.S. squaring off against a faceless enemy in Iraq, it was necessary to create a new demon figure, and the occupiers couldn't have done a better job of it if they had gone to Central Casting: Moqtada al-Sadr is a radical, he's got a big...

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Shi’ite Uprising Signals Double Trouble for US

With U.S. Marines effectively locking down the defiant city of Fallujah in the rebellious "Sunni Triangle," other US military forces in Iraq opened a new front Monday to quash an apparent uprising by a Shiite militia in Baghdad and the south, in what some...

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Don’t Expand NATO!

Further expansion of NATO, an outdated alliance, is not in our national interest and may well constitute a threat to our national security in the future. More than 50 years ago the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed to defend Western Europe and the United...

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Does the US Have the Will to Win?

Would that mob in Fallujah have dared treat the security men of Saddam the way they treated those Americans? Would they have danced and shouted, "Death to Saddam," as they did "Death to Bush"? No way. For every one in those TV pictures and photos would now be in an...

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Chinese Generalizations

In my last column, I made some broad generalizations about Chinese and China. One of the points of the column was to show that Chinese businessmen make decisions based on guanxi. Any businessman – or any foreigner for that matter – has a collection of...

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Phase II of the Anti-Occupation Revolt Begins

The always tense relationship between the Sadrist movement among Iraqi Shiites and the US and its Coalition partners has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Perhaps a third of Iraqi Shiites are sympathetic to the radical, Khomeini-like ideology of Sadrism, and some...

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