Day: November 17, 2010

Sudan is the next big thing

and this conference at NDU December 16 will be a good opportunity to get up to date.

For those who need a reminder, the Southern Sudan independence referendum is scheduled for January 9, followed by a 6 month transition period.  It is going to be an enormous challenge to prevent this from becoming a mess.

Tags :

ISO

a graduate student to write up Carnegie’s event on Kyrgyzstan 12:15-2 pm November 23.  Any takers?  I can’t find the event on their website, but I can forward the email invitation if you are interested.  Just ask daniel@peacefare.net

Tags :

Where is Allawi?

The short answer is London.  Most of his Iraqiyya coalition has returned to the parliament, and some of its members are lobbying hard to be included in Maliki’s cabinet.  But (secularist, Shia) Allawi has abandoned the field.  This leaves the Iraqi secularists, who joined with Sunni Islamists in backing Iraqiyya, without a champion.

The Americans, having lost ground to Tehran in the government formation process, should be starting to invest now in strengthening Iraq’s secularists.  Magnificent as his performance was this time around, it can’t be that Allawi is the only bet for three years from now.  All of us who talk with Iraqis (and the pollsters) know that there is a deep well of Iraqi nationalist, non-sectarian, secularist sentiment in the country.  Now is the time to nurture it.

Tags :

Al Qaeda’s nuclear ambitions

This is scary. Rolf Mowatt-Larssen has a more extended treatment of Ayman al Zawahiri’s justification of the use of weapons of mass destruction against Americans at aq-religious-justification.pdf (application/pdf Object).  Of course the question is whether they will ever get the means, but it would be a mistake to ignore intentions.

Tags :
Tweet