After two months of intense debate, Lebanon’s Christian community has made a fence-straddling presidential nomination. It is too early, however, to expect an end to the current political crisis even if parliament approves the candidate.
General Michel Suleiman, the candidate in question, faces a legal obstacle on his road to the presidency: under Article 49 of the Lebanese constitution, public servants can run for the presidency no earlier than two years after resignation.
At first glance a minor constitutional amendment may seem enough to settle that, but, as the General is likely to find, things are not so simple.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese parliament, which must approve any presidential nomination, has postponed its vote five times since September as no nominee could be found to satisfy both the pro-Western majority in parliament and the opposition.
President Emile Lahoud’s term expired on November 23, and there was no way to put off the crucial vote any longer. Yet another compromise must now be made for the constitutional amendments the situation requires.
General Michel Aoun, a prominent opposition leader, does not think such a compromise will be possible unless the parliamentary majority accepts certain provisos.
In particular, the opposition demands that the presidential term be reduced to two years. This would mean the next election would closely follow the parliamentary poll in 2009.
The opposition also insists on holding power of veto in a government led by a prime minister from outside the ruling coalition.
This goes far beyond any procedural controversy concerning Suleiman’s nomination.
The political tug of war around the presidency began long before the presidential race formally started two months ago. The big question underlying these developments concerns the external powers vying to determine Lebanon’s future policy.
Ironically, the crisis started with constitutional amendments required by Lahoud’s nomination in 1998. As army commander at the time, he faced the same constitutional hurdle as Suleiman does today. To get round this, parliament amended Article 49 to authorize his original nomination as an exceptional instance.
In one of those Lebanese compromises made under foreign pressure it was amended again in 2004 to prolong his presidential term for another three years.
Parliament approved the amendment in a unanimous vote despite resistance amongst the country’s political elite.
This remarkable constitutional flexibility makes it easier to reach compromises on particular political impasses.
The down side is that such compromises are often short-lived, condemning the country to lurch endlessly from one crisis to the next.
Debates around the presidential nomination have been raging for months in a country that is unsteadily balancing on the brink of a civil war and shaken by political assassinations.
The current problems have their roots in the 2004 amendment. It was followed by UN Security Council Resolution 1559, in which the international community, led by France and the United States, objected to Syrian interference in Lebanese affairs.
The resolution bluntly demanded that all foreign troops be withdrawn from Lebanon, when the only foreign military presence in the country at the time was Syrian, and denounced foreign intervention in the upcoming Lebanese election--another clear reference to Syria.
Unfortunately international indignation only proved counterproductive-the tug of war for Lebanon got worse.
Even the compromise nomination of General Suleiman smacks of foreign, rather than domestic, negotiation.
Tellingly, the nomination coincided with the Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland. Though centered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Syrian attendance was amongst the most crucial issues in the run-up to the conference.
EN.RIAN.RU

Noted American statesman Dean Acheson famously opined in a speech at West Point in 1962, “that Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.“ Forty years later, in 2002, Tony Blair and fellow dreamers thought the tragedy of 9/11 provided them with the opportunity once again to play a determining role on the world stage. The notion that Britain was to America as Greece had been to Rome--implying that Britain was going to be the “brain“ and America the “brawn“--became a fashionable topic of discourse in the British media.
No matter how deluded this may have been when viewed objectively, Blair and his acolytes clung to the idea. They hoped to use the Anglo-American “special relationship“ as the vehicle for achieving Britain’s neo-imperial dreams.
Hoping to gain a place at the top table of decision making, and thereby try and shape future events, Blair committed Britain’s forces to fight battles in two countries where Britain had a colonial past: Afghanistan and Iraq.
London thought that its colonial era experience in both countries would enable it to claim superior knowledge and expertise, thus giving British policy proposals inordinate weight, thereby influencing the political and economic shape of the post-conflict era in both countries to British advantage. However, this ambition has already been thwarted in Iraq and is at the point of being thwarted in Afghanistan.
Whether or not British inspired, the proposal that the ISAF mission should be transformed into a NATO mission was of enormous benefit to Britain’s ultimate objective of “destroying“ the Pashtun Taliban, because Britain was fully aware that it neither had the men nor material to achieve its objectives alone--NATO forces were meant to serve the same purpose now as Britain’s colonial native contingents had done in the past, and other countries were going to share the cost of avenging Britain’s past military defeats in Afghanistan--Brilliant!
But nationalistic jingoism was at fever pitch prior to the deployment of British forces to the Pashtun dominated south of Afghanistan.
Then, the British dream encountered the Pashtun reality and became a nightmare.
Tony Blair and his crew received well-deserved public criticism from officers in the field, some of whom resigned.
The British government naturally blamed fellow NATO allies for Britain’s reverses.
Britain’s military failure in Helmand last year, and the public pronouncements of high-level American officials, that there was no military solution to the problems in Afghanistan, convinced London that British chicanery might succeed where British military forces had failed. So, MI6 operative Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles was named HMG’s ambassador to Kabul, supported by a team of 250 of his fellow colleagues.
However, it would appear that Sir Sherard has not been able “to cut the mustard,“ and Britain is pushing hard for another MI6 officer to be named as Britain’s “Viceroy“ in Kabul: Lord Paddy Ashdown, affectionately dubbed by the tabloids as “Paddy Pantsdown“ because of his weakness for the charms of a female member of his staff.
Lord Ashdown, an Ulsterman, (Ulster being a Northern Ireland British province which has contributed more than its fair share to imposing harsh British colonial rule throughout the British Empire) was born in Delhi during the declining days of British rule in India--his father was a Captain in the Indian Army.
After finishing secondary school at age 18, he joined the Royal Marines. During his time in the marines he learned Malay and Chinese, presumably to equip him for serving in British forces then engaged in counter-insurgency operations in British Malaya.
His subsequent career was ostensibly at the Foreign Office, but in fact he was an MI6 officer and served in Geneva under the cover of being the First Secretary at the U.K. Mission to the U.N.
So, clearly Paddy Ashdown has all the qualifications the British deem necessary to implementing Britain’s neo-imperial agendas in Afghanistan, and Britain’s return to playing the “Great Game“ in Central Asia.
But whether the international community will accord him the extensive powers, akin to being named “Viceroy of Afghanistan,“ which Lord Ashdown is demanding as a precondition to accepting the job of “chief international coordinator,“ is both undesirable and unlikely--amalgamating the posts of Head of NATO, Head of U.N. and Head of EU missions in Afghanistan may be a hat trick which even the web-spinners in London may be unable to achieve.
ANTIWAR.COM

Protesters, some in orange prison-like jumpsuits stand outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, Dec. 5.

The atmosphere had all the elements of high drama. Now, after three and a half years of government branches passing enemy combatant cases back and forth like an unwanted child, the issue once again found itself in the US supreme court yesterday. Under the bas-reliefs of Muhammad and Moses, the pharoah Ramses and the classical jurists, the valiant Bush administration solicitor general Paul Clement was pitted against Seth Waxman, solicitor general under President Clinton.
Both argued well, summing up the arguments for what has become a community of colleagues arguing with and against one another. At issue, once again, was whether or not the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have a right to habeas corpus.
To answer that question, the definition of enemy combatant, the issue of sovereignty-- ie the legal status of the naval base at Guantanamo Bay--and the validity of the US military’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals came to the fore.
And on centre stage, an overarching question draped itself over the proceedings: was this chapter in the enemy combatant saga merely marking time, retracing the past in circular fashion, or was there any progress to be made?
The two lawyers began by restating their respective cases. Waxman preferred a straightforward approach that named with little emotion the injustice of the circumstance of the detainees.
Beginning with the fact that the detainees had been there for six years, his argument came to the conclusion that “The time for experimentation is over.“ We’ve seen results of the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act, and these procedures it set up are insufficient, he argued, reiterating the imperative that for justice to be served, these individuals need to be charged or released.
Without access to lawyers, to evidence, to the specifics of the charges against them, he explained, the alleged terrorists need to be granted a fair hearing. And the CSRTs, he insisted, are not an adequate substitute.
Clement offered an impassioned counter argument. Not only are the CSRTs an adequate substitute for habeas, he argued, but the detainees do have rights under the current statutory framework--rights beyond those which would be offered under army regulations, including the right to a personal representative, and to submit documentary evidence.
Clement and Waxman were in agreement on one point, however: recent history does not provide a wealth of guidance about how these issues should be decided.
Precedents on both sides reside in the 18th century, at the time the constitution was written, and in Britain’s 1914 Defence of the Realm Act, rather than with anything closer to home or in the second world war policies over POWs, which the Guantanamo detainees are not.
As a result, the supreme court justices dug even deeper into the distant past. To wit, common law over 500 years ago, “subjecthood“ rather than citizenship, and the legal status of the British empire’s outlying territories.
But over the course of the hour and 20 minutes, it became increasingly clear that these earlier cases seem to offer more opaqueness than clarity.
Overshadowing the usefulness of proximate or relevant distant history has been the spectre of repetition. Instead of case law, we have the enemy combatant cases. Collectively, they have become their own precedent, their own body of law. As a result, a strong sense of deja vu animated the entire session. Several minutes into the proceedings, justice John Roberts interrupted Waxman to ask whether the court had already ruled on the CSRTs and decided that they were OK. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg later wanted to know whether the issue of Guantanamo’s sovereignty hadn’t already been determined by the Court in 2004 case of Rasul v Bush.
Similarly, justice David Souter asked Clement whether or not this wasn’t just a re-arguing of Rasul.
And throughout, there was a sense of repetition about the very nature of the argument. The current administration has maintained for the full three and a half years of hearings that this is a military matter, not a judicial one. And Roberts and justice Antonin Scalia repeated this today, if only briefly and obliquely.
In sum, the prior history of these cases rather than a standing body of law has taken centre stage.
Yet there was a subtle shift taking place under the marble pillars and statuesque reminders of the wisdom of the past. The shift occurred with both counsels and with the justices themselves. Notably, the government refrained from making the usual appeals to fear and the threat of terrorist destruction that have packaged prior arguments. Al-Qaida, 9/11, even the notes of fear were absent from Clement’s argument. He didn’t refer to the war on terrorism until nearly the end of his argument, and then almost as an afterthought.
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

During the 1990s, the Balkans were the scene of Europe’s deadliest wars and worst atrocities since World War II. More recently, the region has been relatively peaceful, but many of its problems have merely been kicked down the road. Now, one of the most dangerous is coming to a head, with a United Nations deadline on Monday for resolving Kosovo’s political status.
Getting Kosovo wrong could plunge the Balkans back into turmoil. To avoid that, Serbia and Russia will have to quickly decide that they have more to gain from stability-- and good relations with Europe and the United States--than from whipping up old hatreds.
Kosovo has been under international trusteeship since 1999 when NATO went to war to reverse Slobodan Milosevic’s brutal campaign to drive out Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority. While formally Kosovo is still a province of Serbia, there can be no question of returning it to Belgrade’s control.
Earlier this year, international mediators worked out a reasonable compromise that acknowledges both the desire of Kosovo’s Albanians for independence and the Serb minority’s legitimate fear of persecution.
The international community will still oversee an independent Kosovo, and ensure that the Serb minority is protected and guaranteed substantial autonomy.
Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leaders are prepared to accept the deal. Unfortunately, the Serbian government and its patrons in Moscow are not.
Russia’s position is cynical. It has no power to regain Kosovo for Serbia and the Kremlin plays its own secessionist games in Georgia and Moldova. President Vladimir Putin has simply been using Kosovo as a handy stick to beat the West and to remind the world that Russia still wields a Security Council veto.
Serbia’s hopes for a brighter future depend on turning its back on Milosevic’s nightmarish legacy and repairing relations with the European Union and NATO. But this is a hard idea to sell in Serbian politics, and no government will risk it as long as Russia is feeding illusions of nostalgic nationalism.
If Moscow makes good on its threats to veto the compromise, Kosovo’s leaders will almost certainly declare independence. Most Western governments say that they would recognize the new (and militarily vulnerable) Kosovo. This would clearly not be a happy situation. But neither would the alternative: leaving Western peacekeepers sitting on the powder keg of an angry and frustrated Albanian majority.
The better approach, for all involved, would be an internationally supervised independence recognized by the United Nations. It is not too late for Moscow to play a more constructive role, and to bring Serbia along with it.
IHT.COM