The Establishment has finally spoken. Nearly 10 years after the tragic death of Princess Diana, a Report prepared by the British Establishment tries to do the impossible--square the circle. The fact that the death of Princess Diana appeared to follow exactly the same sequence of events as she predixcted to her buter seems to me to be crucial. She said that the Palace will try to kill her in a car accident and that happened within weeks of her making that prediction. Does that not appear too ...
Ancient history is facinating largely due to the unexpected surprises it throws up/ Where is the tomb of the great conqueror, Alexander? Where is the last burial spot of Gengiz Khan? There are no answers to these questions. Only speculation tinged with the eternal hope that someday such questions will be answered. May be we have spoken too soon. The facination of ancient histoery probably also lies in the realisation that some questions will for ever remain a mystery. Last week saw the untang...
It is now clear even to the most fanatical Bush acolyte that the neoconservative agenda in Iraq has come unstuck, horribly so. President Bush is trashing about for a solution and the old statesmen of the first Bush Presidency are there to help out in the Baker Commission. A few important points need be stressed. First, the partition of Iraq along sectarian lines will not help in establishing peace in the region. On the contrary it will only add to the list of failed and failing states. Secon...
The Dutch have entered the English language in a rather strange way, the pharse Dutch Uncle. This character is a well endwed, if genrous man who can always be counted on for a no strings attached loan of help. The Dutch Uncle is always a wee bit stupid. well meaning and not above an ocassional tantrum. From such a benign presence in the world of symbols and objects the Dutch are clearly making waves for the wrong reasons. The Right wing Government in power wants to impose a ban on women weari...
I teach in a University and like most human institutions it is full of petty politics, crass pursuit of personal ambitions and at times even downright thuggery. Yet none of this can account for the death at the age of 56 of one of the most senior professors of the University. His death just goes to show that when a man loses his position he sometimes ends up loosing his life as well. Let me start at the very beginning. I met SVN when I joined the University in 1988. He was a professor in t...
As early as the 19th century, the great military strategist and historian of the Napoleonic wars defined war as "politics by other means". In other words war is not an end initself only the instrument throught which stated national/ politicals goals be achieved. This lesson of statecraft was entirely lost on the Bushmen who in their misguided arrogance and deluded by a false sense of infallibility decided to redraw the map of the middle east with a pliant US surrogate lording over the badland...
Now that the Democrats have 51 seats in the Senate and the Republicans 49 there is a small bot effective shift in the balance of power in the political establishment . Beltway politics will be a wee bit different as a result. However the Rpublicans have won a convincing majority in the House of Representatives. If the USA had a parliamntary form of government then the government of the day would have to resign. Bush is trying to brazen his way out of a political crisis by sacrifcing the Secr...
The verdict from the Baghdad court did not come as a surprise. Just a few days back the Prime Minisster of Iraq who is of course backed by the occupation forces had publically called for the execution of Saddam Hussein. This raises the question of the fairness of the entire judicial proceedings instituted by the Iraqi Government. It is a moot point that the massace carried out in 1982 for which President Saddam Hussein has now been sentenced to death was the direct outcome of a botched assasi...
Turkey is located geographically right in the middle of two great continents, Europe that lies west of the Straits of Bosphorus and the vast Asian lands to the east. Such a location is not without its obvious difficulties, a cultural confusion noted right from the days of Herodotus is only one obvious problem. Turkey aspires to join the European Union and as such has to meet certain exacting standards of human rights, judicial due process, political and intellectual freedom etc. This bill of...
In the run up to the Iraq war three years ago, both Republicans and Democrats vied with each other to denounce the threat posed by Saddams alleged weapons of mass destruction and his support for the Al Qaeda. Now after destroting a rich and vibrant country, after killing nearly 650,000 Iraqis ans spending huge sums of tax dollars, the US cotizens now know that their president took them to war for totally unwanted and probably self delided reasons. This is not the time nor the place to state ...
The going hasd not been better for the Democrats if only they get their act together. The Democratsd have taken 11 percentage point lead over the Repuli8cans and the Republicans do not even have a strategy to respond to the Fo9ley Affair. I do not call this a scandalo because Mark Foley by no means misused his position to proposition thye cdongressional page, something Bill Clinton did in his affair withy MONICA. The Repulicans are behasving like a buch of scared buffaloes, trampling over eac...
One of the nice aspects of being a historian is that the past provides a whole range of parallels which illumine and help us understand the present. It has become almost a cliche to state that Islamic Terrorism is the biggest scourge of this era, in much the same way medieval Europeans looked upon the Mongols. Surprisingly the language used to describe the phenomenon of Jehadi liberation idelogy evokes the same kind of apoclyptic exuberance which was once used to describe such horrors as the...
Those of us who have been fgollowing the Iraq war have always known that the USA cannot win the war there. Afterall, the so called Christian, right wing ideo9logues should have known mthat the land and deserts of Irawq have been the graveyard of all empires known to the ancient world. And the USA went into9 thye war, not really with an intention of winning but of intimidating thye Arab world into accepting US hegemony, not imperialism. The real agenda was to help Israel reshape the political ...
It is very difficult to be the Head of State of Pakistan, especially if you are an unelected one having grabbed the throne by a coup d'etat. President Parvez Musharaf overthrew the elected government of Pakistan in a military coup in 1999 and has ruled the country with a mixture of tact and bloodletting. He had his army kill the popular leader of the Baluchi tribal Agency and it could well be the beginning of the end of his regime. However during his recent visit to the White House where he ...
Even in the best of circumstances, Cardinal Ratzinger now Pope Benedict, is known as a tough and erudite theologian. Not withstanding his contropversial membership of the Hitler Youth during his early years, Ratzinger grew in stature during the heady days of the Vatical Council II which oversaw a few doctrinal and liturgical reforms. Pope Benedict has earned a reputation for himself as a conservative upholder of the rights and privileges of the Papcy in the manner of a medieval pope and there...