Our admiration for Obama is grounded in what he represents: fairness. He is the product of a just, democratic system that respects equal opportunity for education and work. This system allowed a black man, after centuries of racial discrimination, to become president. This fairness is precisely what we are missing in Egypt.

That is why the image of Obama meeting with his predecessors in the White House was so touching. Here in Egypt, we don’t have previous or future presidents, only the present head of state who seized power through sham elections and keeps it by force, and who will probably remain in power until the end of his days.

Accordingly, Egypt lacks a fair system that bases advancement on qualifications. Young people often get good jobs because they have connections. Ministers are not elected, but appointed by the president. Not surprisingly, this inequitable system often leads young people to frustration or religious extremism. Others flee the country at any cost, hoping to find justice elsewhere.

We saw Obama as a symbol of this justice. We welcomed him with almost total enthusiasm until he underwent his first real test: Gaza.

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Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s leading candidate to become prime minister after elections next week, has said “everything that is necessary” will be done to stop Iran going nuclear. I believe him.

Never again is never again. There’s no changing that Israeli lens, however distorting it may be in a changed world. That could mean an Israeli attack on Iran within a year. If the U.S. military option is unthinkable, equally unthinkable is the United States abandoning Israel.

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How did this conflict get so fragmented? For starters, it’s gone on way too long. The West Bank is so chopped up and divided now by roads, checkpoints and fences to separate Israel’s crazy settlements from Palestinian villages that a Palestinian could fly from Jerusalem to Paris quicker than he or she could drive from Jenin, here in the northern West Bank, to Hebron in the south.

Another reason is that every idea has been tried and has failed. For the Palestinians, Pan-Arabism, Communism, Islamism have all come and gone, with none having delivered statehood or prosperity. As a result, more and more Palestinians have fallen back on family, clan, town and tribal loyalties. In Israel, Peace Now’s two-state solution was blown up with the crash of the Oslo peace accords, the rising Palestinian birthrate made any plans to annex the West Bank a mortal threat to Israel’s Jewish character, and the rockets that followed Israel’s withdrawals from both Lebanon and Gaza made a mockery of those who said unilateral pullouts were the solution.

All of this has led to a resurgence of religiosity. According to Haaretz, the following questions were posed by a well-known rabbi in one of the pamphlets distributed by the Israeli Army’s Office of Chief Rabbi before the latest Gaza fighting: “Is it possible to compare today’s Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David? A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land.”

Who in the world would want to try to repair this? I’d rather herd cats….

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US President Barack Obama has already used experts within the last few months to hold high-level but discreet talks with both Iran and Syria, organizers of the meetings told AFP.

Officially, Obama’s overtures toward both Tehran and Damascus have remained limited.

In an interview broadcast Monday, Obama said the United States would offer arch-foe Iran an extended hand of diplomacy if the Islamic Republic’s leaders “unclenched their fist.”

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Officials of Barack Obama’s administration have drafted a letter to Iran from the president aimed at unfreezing US-Iranian relations and opening the way for face-to-face talks, the Guardian has learned.

The US state department has been working on drafts of the letter since Obama was elected on 4 November last year. It is in reply to a lengthy letter of congratulations sent by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on 6 November.

Diplomats said Obama’s letter would be a symbolic gesture to mark a change in tone from the hostile one adopted by the Bush administration, which portrayed Iran as part of an “axis of evil”.

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Russia held out an olive branch to President Barack Obama today by suspending plans to deploy missiles in Europe, according to a report in Moscow.

An official from Russia’s General Staff in Moscow told Interfax news that the move had been made because the new United States leadership was reconsidering plans to establish a missile defence shield in eastern Europe.

Deployment of Iskander short-range missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads, was being suspended in Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad in response, the unidentified official said.

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The tears are finally drying ”“ the tears of the Bush years, and the tears of awe at the sight of a black President of the United States. So what now? The cliché of the day is that Barack Obama will inevitably disappoint the hopes of a watching world, but the truth is more subtle than that. If we want to see how Obama will affect us all ”“ for good or bad ”“ we need to trace the deep structural factors that underlie United States foreign policy. A useful case study of these pressures is about to flicker on to our news pages for a moment ”“ from the top of the world.

Bolivia is the poorest country in Latin America, and its lofty slums 13,000 feet above sea level seem a world away from the high theatre of the inauguration. But if we look at this country closely, we can explain one of the great paradoxes of the United States ”“ that it has incubated a triumphant civil rights movement at home, yet thwarted civil rights movements abroad. Bolivia shows us in stark detail the contradictions facing a black President of the American empire.

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Barack Obama talked a lot in his election campaign about a change of strategy in foreign policy. He said he was willing to talk to America’s enemies. The list includes Cuba and Venezuela as well as North Korea; more controversial still was his proposal to talk to Iran. But it also includes a list of Middle Eastern enemies, such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria.

Whether his new policy stretches to opening a dialogue with the Taliban he hasn’t said. But the change of tone is clear. Hard power, force projection, hasn’t achieved much. In many case it’s made matters worse. That is his argument for trying something else. Many of his foreign affairs appointments will start being ratified by the Senate this week, where his fresh approach will be on display in detail.

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MS. [Andrea] MITCHELL: In fact, this “belief in Democracy,” quote/unquote, is what led to supporting the election that led to Hamas having its victory. That has been a misplaced belief, many critics would say, in terms of Bush strategy; and in fact, that there hasn’t been intensive enough day by day, on the ground diplomacy. That’s what the Obama team was planning to bring to the table. It’s clear that Israel did this now, the timing of it now. They’ve been planning for a year. The–Hamas has been defending against it and planning its counteraction for at least a year. They did it now because they wanted to clean the slate before the new administration came in. Despite Obama’s, you know, statements about his support for Israel, he’s still an unknown entity to them, and they knew that they had unrelenting support from the Bush administration. That said, with the ground action now, most people do not believe it’s not going to be done by January 20th.

MR. [DAVID] GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MS. MITCHELL: And it won’t be a clean slate, and it does complicate what Obama and Hillary Clinton have to do.

MR. [HISHAM] MELHEM: The problem with deterrence is that it is easier to be used against states. States can be easily deterred, because the states are responsible for people, for institutions. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to turn–to deter nonstate actors, as we’ve seen with Hezbollah and as we’ve seen with Hamas. If those groups survive politically, to them they succeeded. And they will always go underground and, and, and fight, fight, fight, fight for another day.

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…the real problem is not Iraq. The problem is America. The problem is that 80 percent of Americans believe that their country is on the wrong track, and 75 percent do not believe that the economic situation next summer will be better than it is now. The problem is that of General Motors. The company’s value is now a fraction of Toyota’s. The problem is that Chrysler is on the verge of bankruptcy, Starbucks is in trouble and the Dow Jones is in deep trouble. The problem is that the budget deficit is out of control, the national debt is irreparable and the dollar is worthless. Something about the way the Americans do things is not working. Something is not as it used to be.

Three Rottweilers are now at America’s throat: very expensive energy, badly shrinking credit and a collapsing real estate market. Uncle Sam is bleeding because his dependence on energy is greater than that of other countries. His addiction to credit is more serious than that of other countries, and he is very exposed to the bursting real estate bubble. Cheap energy, cheap money and accelerated construction rescued America from the collapse of the Twin Towers and the high-tech crisis at the beginning of the decade. They enabled America to celebrate as though there were no tomorrow and no bill to pay.

But tomorrow is here. The bill is steep.

The bottom line is cruel and profound: The American century is over. The 40 years (1945-1985) when America was the exclusive leader of the free world are over. The 20 years (1986-2006) when American was in effect the sole superpower are over. The era of imperial America, which dictated the world agenda, is over.

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The head of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries warned Thursday that oil prices would see an “unlimited” increase in the case of a military conflict involving Iran, because the group’s members would be unable to make up the lost production.

“We really cannot replace Iran’s production – it’s not feasible to replace it,” Abdalla Salem El-Badri, the OPEC secretary general, said during an interview.

Iran, the second-largest producing country in OPEC, after Saudi Arabia, produces about 4 million barrels of oil a day out of the daily worldwide production of close to 87 million barrels. The country has been locked in a lengthy dispute with Western countries over its nuclear ambitions.

In recent weeks, the price of oil has risen higher on speculation that Israel could be preparing to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. The saber-rattling intensified this week with missile tests by Iran. That has further shaken oil markets because of concerns that any conflict with Iran could disrupt oil shipments from the Gulf region.

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Iranian Revolutionary Guards practicing war-game maneuvers test-fired nine missiles on Wednesday, including at least one the government in Tehran describes as having the range to reach Israel.

The tests drew sharp American criticism and came a day after the Iranians had threatened to retaliate against Israel and the United States if attacked.

State-run media said the missiles were long- and medium-range weapons, and included the Shahab-3, which Tehran maintains is able to hit targets up to 1,250 miles away from its firing position. Parts of western Iran are within 650 miles of Tel Aviv.

The tests, shown on Iranian television, coincide with increasingly tense exchanges with the West over Tehran’s nuclear program, which Iran says is for civilian purposes but which many Western governments suspect is aimed at building nuclear weapons. Iran’s military display came just a day after the United States and the Czech Republic signed an accord to allow the Pentagon to deploy part of its contentious antiballistic missile shield, which Washington maintains is designed to protect in part against Iranian missiles.

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Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France and a longtime humanitarian, diplomatic and political activist on the international scene, says that whoever succeeds President George W. Bush may restore something of the United States’ battered image and standing overseas, but that “the magic is over.”

In a wide-ranging conversation with Roger Cohen of the International Herald Tribune at the launch of a Forum for New Diplomacy in Paris, Kouchner on Tuesday also held out the hope of talking with Hamas, the Palestinian faction that rules the Gaza Strip but has been ostracized by the West and by its Palestinian rival, Fatah, because it opposes peace talks with Israel and denies that Israel has a right to exist.

Asked whether the United States could repair the damage it has suffered to its reputation during the Bush presidency and especially since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Kouchner replied, “It will never be as it was before.”

“I think the magic is over,” he continued, in what amounted to a sober assessment from one of the strongest supporters in France of the United States.

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Healthcare remains another important point of difference. And here we have a three-way split. McCain would attempt to bring down costs and make insurance more affordable by stimulating competition and cracking down on the big pharmaceutical companies that he believes overcharge patients. Obama has some as-yet-unspecified plan to make insurance more accessible to those who want it. Clinton, clinging to the approach that proved politically disastrous when she headed her husband’s healthcare taskforce, would make insurance compulsory, even for young workers who neither need nor want it, and deduct the cost from their pay cheques if necessary.

Enough detail to make the broad point. This is one of the few elections that create for Americans what Ronald Reagan once called a time for choosing. In 1932 we elected Franklin Roosevelt and put paid to the notion that “that government is best which governs least”. In 1980 we elected Reagan, a Roosevelt-Democrat turned Republican, and put paid to the conservative war against Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This year we will have to choose between a man who is confident that America can ”“ indeed, must ”“ play a leading role in maintaining world order, even at the expense of domestic spending, and a man or woman who believes that America must concentrate its resources on the home front, while relying more on international institutions to keep the world’s democracies safe from its enemies. Little wonder that this American election has attracted so much attention in Britain and around the world. What happens in America won’t stay in America.

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Two messages are appended to the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the artful Hollywood film about a hedonistic Texas congressman who in the 1980s raised covert funding for the Afghan mujahedeen from $5 million to $1 billion, thereby helping to drive the Red Army out of Afghanistan and precipitate the implosion of the Soviet Union. An explicit moral of the movie comes from the real-life Wilson, who lamented that America did the right thing in Afghanistan but messed up “the endgame.” Today there can be little doubt that Washington’s brusque loss of interest in the fate of Afghanistan after the Soviets’ withdrawal was a calamitous error.

But it is the second, more philosophical message that ought to be at the center of current debate about America’s role in the world. This lesson, which the Bush administration has learned all too slowly, teaches the need for humility in those who make America’s moves on a global chessboard – a virtue that seems almost totally absent from the patriotic posturing of the presidential candidates.

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The resurgence of China and India, to say nothing of the “energy empires’’ of Iran and Russia, means that, in relative terms, Anglo-American hegemony is already on the wane. Above all, Mead overlooks the extent to which the very un-Weberian culture of consumption, which has become the motive force of the Anglophone economies, has rendered them as dependent on foreign capital as were the moribund empires of the Ottomans, Qing and Romanovs a century ago.

Meanwhile, over Iraq, fissures have opened within the English-speaking world. There is abundant evidence, not discussed here, that other Anglophone peoples feel a diminished affinity with their US counterparts. Mead is quite wrong to assume, for example, that religion is as “persistent’’ in the rest of the Anglosphere as it is in the US.

Though there’s no harm in celebrating what we have in common ”“ and Mead does it well ”“ the differences between Anglos and Americans are much greater than he implies. Divided by much more than just a common language, it will take much more than a hyphen to reunite us.

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So last November, Coleman joined 15 other protesters from around the country in trespassing on the U.S. Army base, hoping to draw attention to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The institute is the successor to the better-known School of the Americas, which trained leaders later linked to human rights abuses in El Salvador, Guatemala and other countries.

For his misdemeanor, Coleman served nearly two months in Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center.

His activism didn’t end there. Shortly after being released in June, Coleman flew to Washington on his 70th birthday to lobby for an appropriations amendment that would have partially cut funding to the Ft. Benning facility. The measure was defeated in the House of Representatives by a slim margin, but Coleman remains optimistic.

With luck, he said, “a year from now, we’ll be going back to celebrate.”

Friday, the church will hold a potluck dinner and program at which Coleman and others will discuss their experiences with the vigils held each November at Ft. Benning.

And when protesters return to Georgia on Nov. 16-18, Coleman and other members of University Church will be there, though the pastor does not plan to trespass again. As in past years, only a few among thousands attending are likely to risk arrest and imprisonment.

The protests have been organized since 1990 by a group called SOA Watch, founded by Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Vietnam veteran turned Catholic priest and an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Many of the group’s supporters have religious backgrounds.

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Is the Pentagon truly going to deploy an army of cultural relativists to Muslim nations in an effort to make the world a safer place?

A few weeks ago this newspaper reported on an experimental Pentagon “human terrain” program to embed anthropologists in combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. It featured two military anthropologists: Tracy (last name withheld), a cultural translator viewed by American paratroopers as “a crucial new weapon” in counterinsurgency; and Montgomery McFate, who has taken her Yale doctorate into active duty in a media blitz to convince skeptical colleagues that the occupying forces should know more about the local cultural scene.

How have members of the anthropological profession reacted to the Pentagon’s new inclusion agenda? A group calling itself the Network of Concerned Anthropologists has called for a boycott and asked faculty members and students around the country to pledge not to contribute to counterinsurgency efforts. Their logic is clear: America is engaged in a brutal war of occupation; if you don’t support the mission then you shouldn’t support the troops. Understandably these concerned scholars don’t want to make it easier for the American military to conquer or pacify people who once trusted anthropologists. Nevertheless, I believe the pledge campaign is a way of shooting oneself in the foot.

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A SENIOR Downing Street aide has sounded out Washington on the possibility of an early British military withdrawal from Iraq.

Simon McDonald, the prime minister’s chief foreign policy adviser, left the impression that he was “doing the groundwork” for Gordon Brown, according to one of those he consulted.

Brown, who arrives at Camp David in Maryland today to meet President George W Bush, said yesterday that “the relationship with the United States is our single most important bilateral relationship”.

Downing Street remains emphatic that he will not unveil a plan to withdraw British troops, who are due to remain in southern Iraq until the Iraqi army is deemed capable of maintaining security. A spokesman said there had been no change in the government’s position.

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From yesterday’s (London) Times:

Democracy, Winston Churchill famously observed, is the worst form of government ever devised ”“ except for all the others. Well, he was right about the first part.

In America these days democracy is living down to its reputation, producing sticking-plaster solutions to epochal challenges, indulging the worst populist instincts of its voters, throwing up demagogic leaders unworthy of the job and rejecting those of true courage. The most depressing spectacle is unfolding over Iraq. Washington has reached the stage where vital national interests ”“ and the security of much of the world ”“ are being determined almost entirely by immediate, panicky political considerations. Americans want their troops home.

It’s a wholly understandable sentiment. But it is one that needs to be resisted, not massaged and nurtured, as members of Congress from both parties have been doing.

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Amnesty International has warned that the internet “could change beyond all recognition” unless action is taken against the erosion of online freedoms.
The warning comes ahead of a conference organised by Amnesty, where victims of repression will outline their plights.

The “virus of internet repression” has spread from a handful of countries to dozens of governments, said the group.

Amnesty accused companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo of being complicit in the problem.

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The US is increasingly concerned about China’s deployment of mobile land and sea-based ballistic nuclear missiles that have the range to hit the US, according to people familiar with an imminent Pentagon report on China’s military.

The 2007 Pentagon China military power report will highlight the surprising pace of development of a new Jin-class submarine equipped to carry a nuclear ballistic missile with a range of more than 5,000 miles.

Washington is also concerned about the strategic implications of China’s preparations later this year to start deploying a new mobile, land-based DF-31A intercontinental ballistic missile that could target the whole US.

Robert Gates, US defence secretary, on Thursday said the report would not exaggerate the threat posed by China. “It paints a picture of a country that is devoting substantial resources to the military and developing…some very sophisticated capabilities.”

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