Seven long months after parliamentary elections, Iraqis still don’t have a government. Yet Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was on another international road trip Monday ”” this one to Tehran, where he was soliciting the mullahs’ support for his bid to maintain power in Baghdad.

Mr. Maliki also was just in Syria and Jordan and is expected to visit Egypt and Turkey. Reuters reported that he is offering Arab states investment deals if they nudge his rival, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, toward accepting Mr. Maliki’s leadership. Mr. Allawi, whose Sunni-backed, secular-Shiite coalition called Iraqiya bested Mr. Maliki’s Shiite State of Law bloc by two seats in the election, has also been on the road trawling for support.

Iraq needs good relations with its neighbors. But more than anything it needs a legitimate government able to address its many deep problems. Rather than trading unseemly favors with other countries, Mr. Maliki should be working full time with Mr. Allawi and other leaders to break the political impasse at home. Mr. Allawi needs to be open to compromise.

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China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted shipments of some of those same materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said on Tuesday.

The Chinese action, involving rare earth minerals that are crucial to manufacturing many advanced products, seems certain to further ratchet up already rising trade and currency tensions with the West. Until recently, China typically sought quick and quiet accommodations on trade issues. But the interruption in rare earth supplies is the latest sign from Beijing that Chinese officials are willing to use their growing economic muscle.

“The embargo is expanding” beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities. They said Chinese customs officials imposed the broader shipment restrictions Monday morning, hours after a top Chinese official had summoned international news media Sunday night to denounceUnited States trade actions.

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A leaked draft of the national security document suggested that military conflict with another state will come only fourth in a list of potential threats to the UK, behind terror outrages by groups like al Qaida, cyber-attacks and natural disasters.

Today’s launch comes just days after the head of the Government’s GCHQ eavesdropping centre, Iain Lobban, warned of the very real danger of cyber-terrorism directed at the UK’s critical computer infrastructure.

He said that there were 20,000 malicious emails on Government networks every month, and significant disruption had been caused to official systems by electronic “worms”. Cyberspace had “lowered the bar for entry to the espionage game for states and criminals”.

Reports suggest that cyber-warfare could receive a £500 million boost in tomorrow’s SDSR.

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The Obama administration backed away on Friday from a showdown with Beijing over the value of China’s currency that would have caused new frictions between the world’s only superpower and its largest creditor.

The Treasury Department delayed a much-anticipated decision on whether to label China as a currency manipulator until after the U.S. congressional elections on November 2 and a Group of 20 leaders summit in South Korea on November 11.

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Although the announcement of the preliminary results of the parliamentary elections planned for Sunday were postponed, interviews with Afghan and western officials indicate that fraud was pervasive and that nearly 25 percent of the votes will be thrown out.

The fraud, which included ballot-box stuffing, citizens forced to cast their votes at gunpoint, corrupt election officials and security forces complicit with corrupt candidates, is expected to mean that 800,000 to a million votes will be nullified, according to two western officials who are following the election closely. The Afghan Independent Election Commission, which oversees the election, has refused to disclose the number of votes that could be thrown out but said in a statement that it had decided to nullify wholly or partially the votes cast at 430 polling centers and that votes at another 830 sites were being audited, suggesting substantial problems.

Until now the commission has been praised for endeavoring to run an honest vote-counting process, but the delay at the last minute, as hundreds of candidates have thronged to Kabul clamoring to know the results.

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Norway’s Nobel Peace Prize committee has done the right thing in awarding this year’s prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. The furious reaction of the Chinese state shows just how complicated doing the right thing will become as we advance into an increasingly post-Western world.

Liu is exactly the kind of person who deserves this prize, alongside Andrei Sakharov, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. For more than 20 years, he has consistently advocated nonviolent change in China, always in the direction of more respect for human rights, the rule of law and democracy. He has paid for this peaceful advocacy with years of imprisonment and harassment. Unlike last year’s winner, Barack Obama, who got the prize just for what he had promised to do, Liu gets it for what he has actually done.

The Chinese authorities tried hard to prevent him getting it. They directly threatened the Nobel committee with negative consequences for Chinese-Norwegian relations. They have since described the award as an “obscenity,” forbidden any mention of it in the censored Chinese media, placed Liu’s wife under house arrest, detained other critical intellectuals, canceled export talks with Norway ”” and are now doubtless debating how to play it from here.

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United States-led forces are permitting the movement of senior Taliban leaders to attend initial peace talks in Kabul, the clearest indication of American support for high-level discussions aimed at ending the war in Afghanistan, senior NATO and Obama administration officials said.

While the talks involve senior members of the Taliban, officials emphasized that they were preliminary, and that they could not tell how serious the insurgents ”” or the weak government of President Hamid Karzai ”” were about reaching an accord.

But comments by administration officials in Washington and a senior NATO official in Brussels on Wednesday indicated that the United States was doing more to encourage a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan than officials had previously disclosed, and might reflect growing pessimism that the buildup of American forces there will produce decisive gains against the Taliban insurgency.

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Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates met his Chinese counterpart, Liang Guanglie, in Vietnam on Monday for the first time since the two militaries suspended talks with each other last winter, calling for the two countries to prevent “mistrust, miscalculations and mistakes.”

His message seemed directed mainly at officers like Lt. Cmdr. Tony Cao of the Chinese Navy.

Days before Mr. Gates arrived in Asia, Commander Cao was aboard a frigate in the Yellow Sea, conducting China’s first war games with the Australian Navy, exercises to which, he noted pointedly, the Americans were not invited.

Nor are they likely to be, he told Australian journalists in slightly bent English, until “the United States stops selling the weapons to Taiwan and stopping spying us with the air or the surface.”

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SPIEGEL ONLINE: The main source of this warning is a 36-year-old German member of the radical Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Ahmed Sidiqqi, who was trained in Pakistan and is now being held in American custody in Afghanistan. Why is Pakistan still the main breeding ground of terrorism?

Jones: We have been working very closely with the Pakistani government for a long time now. In some cases the Pakistanis have responded quite well. Their operations in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan, for example, were timely and very effective. At the same time, there has been a very steady message that Pakistan needs to do more to stem terrorism, especially when they know where it is and when officials have information about what the terrorists are doing. If the Pakistanis are going to be a partner in the long term, they have to make a commitment that shows the watching world that they are serious about forms of terrorism.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Should your cooperation with the Pakistani army fail, is there a possibility that Pakistan would become the next military target of the US?

Jones: I am going to take the optimistic view that rational people do rational things and that — with the help of friends and allies and common goals — Pakistan will avoid, or hopefully avoid, that unfortunate eventuality.

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Members of Pakistan’s spy agency are pressing Taliban field commanders to fight the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan, some U.S. officials and Afghan militants say, a development that undercuts a key element of the Pentagon’s strategy for ending the war.

The explosive accusation is the strongest yet in a series of U.S. criticisms of Pakistan, and shows a deteriorating relationship with an essential ally in the Afghan campaign. The U.S. has provided billions of dollars in military and development aid to Pakistan for its support.

The U.S. and Afghanistan have sought to persuade midlevel Taliban commanders to lay down their weapons in exchange for jobs or cash. The most recent Afghan effort at starting a peace process took place this week in Kabul.

But few Taliban have given up the fight, officials say….

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When Nuri Kamal al-Maliki began his bid for re-election as prime minister ”” exactly a year ago on Saturday ”” he pledged to unite a population splintered and suspicious after years of war. He has not, and while he is hardly alone in blame, the consequences could haunt Iraq for years to come.

The purging of ballot lists before the election, the contentious and inconclusive challenges to the results, and the protracted delay in forming a new government since then have all deepened the ethnic, sectarian and societal cracks in a newly democratic state as fragile as an ancient Babylonian vase.

Sunni leaders in particular are angry at the prospect that they may be disenfranchised once again.

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The Palestinian leadership said Saturday that four-week-old direct talks with Israel should be suspended as long as Jewish settlement housing was being built in the West Bank. It called on the international community to pressure Israel to stop the construction.

A statement issued after a meeting of about 35 Palestinian leaders ”” the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the central committee of the main Fatah movement and a handful of others ”” held at the compound of the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, said that Israel was responsible for the deadlock.

“The leadership confirms that the resumption of talks requires tangible steps, the first of them a freeze on settlements,” Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior P.L.O. official said after the three-hour meeting. “The Palestinian leadership holds Israel responsible for obstructing the negotiations.”

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The House of Representatives by a wide margin passed legislation to penalize China’s foreign-exchange practices, sending a powerful warning to Beijing but risking a response that could harm U.S. companies and consumers.

The measure would allow, but not require, the U.S. to levy tariffs on countries that undervalue their currencies, which makes their goods cheaper relative to American products. A majority of Republicans lined up with Democrats to pass the bill on a 348-79 vote, highlighting lawmakers’ long-simmering frustration with Chinese trade practices as well as their sensitivity to the faltering U.S. economic recovery with an election looming.

The vote marks the strongest trade measure aimed at China to make it through a chamber of Congress after more than a decade of threats by lawmakers. But despite the broad support Wednesday, dim Senate prospects make it unlikely the measure would become law this year.

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The US says it is “disappointed” by Israel’s decision not to extend a ban on West Bank settlement building.

US Middle East envoy George Mitchell has been sent to the region in an attempt to salvage direct peace talks that were restarted earlier this month.

The 10-month moratorium came to an end at midnight (2200 GMT on Sunday).

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The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” ”” including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

But law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers.

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Federal prosecutors in New York have opened a criminal probe of one of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brothers, raising the stakes in Washington’s sometimes-contentious dealings with the Karzai government.

U.S. officials said Mahmood Karzai has become a focus in a corruption probe handled by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, an office that has a history of charging, extraditing and trying suspects in far-flung parts of the world, including Afghanistan.

ny move to indict Mahmood Karzai, who is a U.S. citizen, carries huge risks for American officials, whose anticorruption efforts have often provoked sharp backlashes from President Karzai.

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The greatest geopolitical development that has occurred largely beneath the radar of our Middle East-focused media over the past decade has been the rise of Chinese sea power. This is evinced by President Obama’s meeting Friday about the South China Sea, where China has conducted live-fire drills and made territorial claims against various Southeast Asian countries, and the dispute over the Senkaku Islands between Japan and China in the East China Sea, the site of a recent collision between a Chinese fishing trawler and two Japanese coast guard ships.

Whereas an island nation such as Britain goes to sea as a matter of course, a continental nation with long and contentious land borders, such as China, goes to sea as a luxury. The last time China went to sea in the manner that it is doing was in the early 15th century, when the Ming Dynasty explorer Zheng He sailed his fleets as far as the Horn of Africa. His journeys around the southern Eurasian rim ended when the Ming emperors became distracted by their land campaigns against the Mongols to the north. Despite occasional unrest among the Muslim Uighur Turks in western China, history is not likely to repeat itself. If anything, the forces of Chinese demography and corporate control are extending Chinese power beyond the country’s dry-land frontiers — into Russia, Mongolia and Central Asia….

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Throughout this volume, the Obama administration is depicted as deeply divided and riven with suspicions: the president feeling boxed in by the Pentagon, members of the military battling the White House and one another. In addition to the well-known putdowns of the president’s national security team by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the commander of forces in Afghanistan (which appeared in Rolling Stone magazine and led to his firing last June), and the much-chronicled tensions between senior military officers and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Mr. Woodward recounts a cornucopia of conflicts and adversarial agendas ”” and much pettiness, in-fighting and score-settling that stand in awful contrast to the sobering realities of a nearly nine-year-old war that has already claimed more than 1,000 American lives.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former campaign strategist Mark Penn is described as urging her to take the job of secretary of state because, in Mr. Woodward’s words, “if she did the job for four years, Obama might be in trouble and have to dump Biden and pick her to run with him as vice president.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is described as trying to withhold a “hybrid option” ”” requiring a fewer number of troops ”” from consideration, and even knocking heads with Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the commander of the United States Central Command, over a memo about prospects in Afghanistan.

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The U.S. and other western delegations walked out of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s U.N. speech Thursday after he said “most people around the world” believe the United States government was responsible for the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

Mr. Ahmadinejad told world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly that it was mostly U.S. government officials who believed a terrorist group was behind the suicide hijacking attacks that brought down New York’s World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon.

Another theory, he said, was that people “within the U.S. government” orchestrated the attacks to reverse the declining American economy and to save what he called Israel’s “Zionist regime.”

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To visit China today as an American is to compare and to be compared. And from the very opening session of this year’s World Economic Forum here in Tianjin, our Chinese hosts did not hesitate to do some comparing. China’s CCTV aired a skit showing four children ”” one wearing the Chinese flag, another the American, another the Indian, and another the Brazilian ”” getting ready to run a race. Before they take off, the American child, “Anthony,” boasts that he will win “because I always win,” and he jumps out to a big lead. But soon Anthony doubles over with cramps. “Now is our chance to overtake him for the first time!” shouts the Chinese child. “What’s wrong with Anthony?” asks another. “He is overweight and flabby,” says another child. “He ate too many hamburgers.”

That is how they see us.

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Renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are opening in Egypt, amid concern over the imminent expiry of Israel’s partial ban on West Bank settlement building.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are holding three-way talks with Hillary Clinton in Sharm-el-Sheikh.

Before the talks began the US secretary of state had said Israel should extend its freeze on West Bank construction.

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“If you just rely on the military””we’ve seen the result,” explains Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, the senior presidential adviser for peace and reconciliation. “There is no purely military solution in Afghanistan.”

American military commanders say they back Mr. Karzai’s effort to court members of the Taliban, comparing it to the successful strategy in Iraq to win over Sunni Arab insurgents.

But key leaders of Afghanistan’s three largest ethnic minorities told The Wall Street Journal that they oppose Mr. Karzai’s outreach to the Taliban, which they said could pave the way for the fundamentalist group’s return to power and reignite civil war.

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The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, succeeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could possibly have envisioned. This is not just because they resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, nor only because they struck at the heart of American financial and military power. Those outcomes were only the bait; it would remain for the United States to spring the trap.

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

It did not have to be this way. The Bush administration’s initial response was just about right. The calibrated combination of CIA operatives, special forces and air power broke the Taliban in Afghanistan and sent bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda scurrying across the border into Pakistan. The American reaction was quick, powerful and effective — a clear warning to any organization contemplating another terrorist attack against the United States. This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared “mission accomplished,” with the caveat that unspecified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda’s leader. The world would have understood, and most Americans would probably have been satisfied.

But the insidious thing about terrorism is that there is no such thing as absolute security….

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Mr. Blair has a pleasing capacity to take us with him into privileged places, whether it’s upstairs at the White House (where, over dinner, he finds Mr. Bush “unbelievably, almost preternaturally calm” before his major speech to Congress after 9/11) or to Balmoral itself, where he must dash down long corridors to the toilet facilities, which are both remote and old-fashioned”” Victorian water closets. He gives a frank account of how hard it was, in his early years as prime minister, to get on with Queen Elizabeth, who treated him with “hauteur.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Blair offers a robust defense of his role in taking Britain into the Iraq war, though he agonizes over the invasion’s violent aftermath. To this day he sees the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as the one true course for his country (and ours). More surprisingly, he notes that his close relations with the U.S., despite the war’s unpopularity, gave him increased stature with other world leaders, who assumed that he had Mr. Bush’s ear.

As for the joint U.S.-British decision to seek (in vain) United Nations approval for the Iraq invasion, Mr. Blair has no apologies. He reveals that although Vice President Dick Cheney was adamantly opposed to involving the U.N., Mr. Bush did not take much persuading. In any case, the U.N. declined to authorize the use of military force, and the invasion went ahead anyway. Clearly, for Mr. Blair, it was better to have tried multilaterally and lost than never to have tried at all.

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The “compassionate release” of a convicted PanAm bomber in 2009 was an affront to justice and to the families of the 270 people who died in Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988. It looks even worse given the perspective that the following year has provided….

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Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle East on the Index of Political Freedom from The Economist’s Intelligence Unit ”” behind Israel, Lebanon and Morocco, but ahead of Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and Tunisia. Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis say they want a democracy, while only 19 percent want an Islamic state.

In short, there has been substantial progress on the things development efforts can touch most directly: economic growth, basic security, and political and legal institutions. After the disaster of the first few years, nation building, much derided, has been a success. When President Obama speaks to the country on Iraq, he’ll be able to point to a large national project that has contributed to measurable, positive results.

Of course, to be honest, he’ll also have to say how fragile and incomplete this success is. Iraqi material conditions are better, but the Iraqi mind has not caught up with the Iraqi opportunity.

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Iraq’s prime minister has said the country is “independent” as the US formally ends combat operations.

Nouri Maliki said the country’s security forces would now deal with all threats, domestic or other.

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The outgoing commander of American forces in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, said Sunday that a new Iraqi government could still be two months away and warned that a stalemate beyond that could create demands for a new election to break the deadlock that has lasted since March.

While General Odierno said he believed negotiations had picked up and would prove successful, he predicted politicians still required “four to six to eight weeks.”

“That’s a guess,” he said in an interview at his headquarters, whose plaster roof is still engraved with the initials of Saddam Hussein. “If it goes beyond 1 October, what does that mean? Could there be a call for another election? I worry about that a little bit.”

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More than 30 people have been killed and dozens injured in a series of bomb attacks across Iraq.

There have been several blasts in Baghdad, including one in which 15 people died. At least 15 were killed in a suicide attack in Kut in the south.

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For now, 50,000 troops will remain ”” combat ready but assigned primarily to training Iraqi forces, a shift made somewhat awkward by Obama’s rigid deadline. It will force the State Department, for instance, to hire an army of private security contractors to take over functions that would more appropriately be handled by the military.

That is odd and troubling. But it doesn’t alter the fact that a large combat force is no longer needed. By every measure in the comprehensive Iraq Index maintained by the Brookings Institution, violence has plummeted. Civilian casualties are down to 1,366 so far this year vs. 34,500 in 2006, the year before President Bush’s “troop surge” strategy reversed the course of the war. U.S. military fatalities stand at 43 this year in Brookings’ July measure, just 1% of the 4,415 who’ve given their lives since the invasion began in 2003. This year, 280 troops have been wounded, vs. 6,412 in 2006.

Stability, the overriding U.S. priority after post-invasion blunders sent Iraq tumbling into chaos, has been achieved. But whether Iraqis can keep it is an open question.

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