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China cherishes its 'jade
kingdom'
Described in
China as a "jade kingdom on Earth", Myanmar has
long been viewed as a country of riches from which
successive Chinese dynasties commanded tributes.
Given this history of involvement in Myanmar's
fortunes, Beijing can be expected to hold on to
its unique capacity to influence its future. (Oct 2,
'07)
A
crack opens in the Korean wall
To
the surprise of some, North Korean leader Kim
Jong-il did personally welcome South Korean
President Roh Moo-hyun in Pyongyang on Tuesday.
But what counts is that Kim gave the clear
impression that their summit might be more than
show, more than a highly scripted affair confined
to platitudes about the need for reconciliation,
peace and economic cooperation. - Donald
Kirk (Oct 2,
'07)
Tajikistan
struggles for power
Tajikistan is
desperately short of electricity, with most of it
consumed by the Talco aluminum plant, the
country's major earner of foreign currency by far.
The United States, Russia, China, India and the
European Union are all bidding the billions of
dollars required to build the dams and power
stations needed to provide more energy. And this
despite the extremely dubious example of Talco's
dealings with foreign partners. - John Helmer
(Oct 2,
'07)
 SUN WUKONG
Beyond
Confucius
and communism
While China long ago
officially discarded Confucian rituals in favor of
communism, old traditions die hard, including ones
that are being perverted by corrupt officials
glorifying their personal fiefdoms. President Hu
Jintao's solution, a simple moral code of "Eight
Honors and Eight Shames", will shortly be
enshrined in the Chinese constitution, but what is
needed is a blend of old respect for order
enforced by a detailed and modern rule of law. -
Wu Zhong (Oct 2,
'07)
THE ROVING
EYE
The
southern axis of evil
After
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's frosty
reception in New York, the red carpets were rolled
out for him in Bolivia and Venezuela, Iran's key
strategic allies in South America. The trade deals
Ahmadinejad signed are significant, as is his
realization of which way the winds are blowing in
a new world order. - Pepe Escobar (Oct 2,
'07)
 KEBABBLE
A
meaty tale of sordid murder
The
Turkish term for cannibalism is yam yam,
which sounds disturbingly similar to the English
"yum yum". That's about the tastiest aspect of the
story of Ozgur Dengiz, who has been accused
of killing a man and eating him. - Fazile
Zahir (Oct 2,
'07)
 SPENGLER
The
devil and Alan
Greenspan
Former US Federal Reserve chief Alan
Greenspan points a finger at credit rating
agencies for not knowing what they were doing
and causing the crisis in the financial world.
It might just as well have been the devil, for
the world deserves just that sort of imp for its
sloth, complacency and humbug. Either way,
Americans have to learn they cannot surf the
wave of the world's savings forever, and Asians
must learn that they cannot avoid risk by
placing their savings in America. (Oct 1,
'07)
No such thing as a Sure
Thing
While
the analytical theories and blame casting has
been fast and furious since the international
market spasms of August, it all boils down to
the same lessons lowly gamblers have been
learning - and forgetting - at the race tracks
for decades. - Julian Delasantellis
(Oct 1,
'07) |
Cracks emerge in Myanmar
military unity
While there's a lull in the bloody protests that have rocked
Myanmar, it's now clear that part of the artificial calm is the result of a
growing rift between the nation's two top military leaders over the next step -
more brute force or dialogue, conceivably with a UN special envoy and detained
opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Reports that individual soldiers also
resisted firing on protesters are also emerging. - Larry Jagan
(Oct 1, '07)
Al-Qaeda wants a part of Afghan
talks
Although the Taliban have rejected Afghan President Hamid Karzai's latest offer
of peace talks, this is by no means the end of this avenue, given the intense
political jockeying in such sensitive matters. What does remain a major
stumbling block, though, is al-Qaeda, which also wants to be accommodated if
any deals are being made. - Syed Saleem Shahzad
(Oct 1, '07)
China reshuffle sends message to Taiwan
 An
expected shakeup of China's Central Military Commission at the upcoming 17th
National Congress will bring in at least five generals with previous
Taiwan-related credentials. It's a not-so-subtle signal by President Hu Jintao
concerning his displeasure with Taiwan's push for UN membership. - Fong
Tak-ho (Oct 1, '07)
FILM REVIEW
A failed
kingdom
The Kingdom directed
by Peter Berg
Using explosive real events as its base, this fictional film strains to stir
emotions, despite all the action. It plays fast and loose with facts and is
disturbingly rife with anti-Arab bias. In short, it is a cliched, slick,
manipulative effort that fails. - Kaveh L Afrasiabi
(Oct 1, '07)
Ahmadinejad and Bush: Mirror men
An in-person meeting with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad reveals someone
quite unimpressive. With his rambling platitudes and inclination to twist his
faith to meet his ideological convictions he's alarmingly like his nemesis,
President George W Bush. He's also a lame duck president with a faltering
following in his own country. - Stephen Zunes
(Oct 1, '07)
China's
trillion-dollar kitty is
launched
To utilize part of its
over US$1 trillion in foreign-exchange reserve for
overseas investing, Beijing has officially
unleashed China Investment Corp. It
has already invested $3 billion in the US
private equity firm, Blackstone Group.
Transparency is pledged, but so far it's too early
to judge. (Oct 1,
'07)
A massive wrench in Putin's works
Turkmenistan, the energy-rich gas powerhouse of Central Asia, was all but in
Moscow's pocket, having agreed to allow Russia almost exclusive access to its
vast reserves and exports. Russian President Vladimir Putin was poised to deal
a death blow to Western plans to bring Turkmen gas to the European market
bypassing Russian territory. Almost overnight, Turkmenistan appears to be
responding to desperate US and European Union moves to recover lost ground.
With Iran and China pulling in other directions, the great game has taken a
dramatic twist. - M K Bhadrakumar (Sep
28, '07)
Myanmar's
blogs of bloodshed
 With
the borders virtually sealed, foreign journalists barred and news censored,
bloggers in Myanmar have become citizen journalists, detailing their first-hand
experiences in words and pictures of chaos, gunfire and death and enabling the
world to watch. But now, in an ominous development, even this
outlet is being blocked by the junta. - Richard S Ehrlich
(Sep 28, '07)
Anti-Iran hawks win partial
victory
It's official. The US Senate has approved an amendment calling
for the White House to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a "foreign
terrorist organization". Meanwhile, infighting between Vice President Dick
Cheney's hawkish cabal and more cautious US military brass has intensified. - Jim
Lobe (Sep 28, '07)
COMMENT
Unveiling men
in the Arab world
While Islamic clerics debate minutiae such as breast-feeding,
or whether actors portraying a wedded couple are really "married" or not under
Islamic law, or vent their fury at Danish cartoons, they are ignoring larger,
more meaningful issues such as the invisible veil of ignorance worn by men. The
veil not only blinds them; more important, it also diminishes Islam in others'
eyes. - Sami Moubayed (Sep 28, '07)
 CHAN
AKYA
Capitalism does work
America's subprime problems have unleashed a torrent of left-wing chest-beating
among the world's media, a lot of which casts the borrowers as victims of
unscrupulous lenders. Much of the criticism, especially in Europe and Asia,
appears to have extended to capitalism and free markets in general. For
economies across Asia, though, now is hardly the time to experiment with any
alternative systems.
| MYANMAR:
HOLY MEN AND MAYHEM |
Monks in the vanguard for regime
change
As they have done on numerous occasions over the decades,
Buddhist monks have taken to the streets calling for political change. But with
the first of their ranks reportedly gunned down and having captured the
popular imagination, the monks have raised their demands from dialogue between
the government and opposition political parties to full-blown regime change. - Brian
McCartan (Sep 27, '07)
 The
man behind the madness
Ailing, aloof and said to be deeply superstitious and paranoid, Myanmar's
military despot General Than Shwe is rarely seen, virtually never heard in his
own voice, but also a man who maintains a vise-like grip on his impoverished
nation through psychological and physical terror. The current chaos, though,
provides another ambitious soldier a pretext to seize power for a new, and
perhaps more moderate, military faction. - Richard Ehrlich and Shawn W
Crispin (Sep 27, '07) |
FILM REVIEW
How the 'gang
of four' lost Iraq
No End in Sight directed by Charles Ferguson
There's nothing "new" in this fresh, lucid documentary that details the Bush
administration's tragic mismanagement of the Iraq war, but what Ferguson brings
into sharp, jarring focus is the sheer incompetence - often from the lips of
those involved - that spawned the current maelstrom. - Khody Akhavi
(Sep 27, '07)
THE ROVING EYE
Buddha vs the barrel of a gun
With the United Nations as his stage, US President George W Bush announced to
the world his decision to slap new economic sanctions on Myanmar. This is just
for internal American consumption. The outcome of the showdown between
thousands of Buddhist monks and the military rulers in Myanmar will in all
likelihood be decided in China. - Pepe Escobar (Sep
26, '07)
The
Iraq oil grab that went awry
US officials have consistently dismissed the notion that the Iraq war was all
about oil as too simple-minded for serious debate. Now former Federal Reserve
chief Alan Greenspan has waded in, writing that "the Iraq war is largely about
oil". The dreams of black gold have spawned a story of greed, mismanagement and
incompetence of spectacular proportions. - Dilip Hiro
(Sep 26, '07)
Russia is far from
oil's peak
Russia has a radically different scientific approach to discovering
oil, turning the Peak Oil theory on its head. With Moscow possessing
this geopolitical trump card, it is not surprising that the US has
gone about erecting a "wall of steel" - military bases and anti-missile
shields - around Russia to cut its pipeline and port links to western Europe,
China and the rest of Eurasia. - F William Engdahl
(Sep 26, '07) |
THE ROVING EYE
'Hitler'
does New York
Despite his demonization by the White House, US media and
his Columbia University host, Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad's skillful and manipulative Big Apple blitz has wowed the
audience that really matters: the global Muslim "street". For those
who listened, unlike the many who simply branded the man as too evil
to speak, Ahmadinejad coolly turned American disinformation on its head,
to his own advantage. - Pepe Escobar
(Sep 25, '07)
ASIA HAND
Burning down Myanmar's Internet
firewall
Despite being under one the most extreme Internet censorship
regimes in the world, Myanmar's tech-savvy citizen journalists have found ways
to burrow under the junta's firewall. From hidden Internet cafes, proxy
servers, proxy sites, encrypted e-mail accounts and http tunnels are keeping
the information flowing about the current unrest. - Shawn W Crispin
(Sep 20, '07)
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