| | | | Fareed: Trump's Risky Middle East Bet | | President Trump has given a green light "to an extraordinary series of moves" in Saudi Arabia that could destabilize the country and the Middle East, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. In throwing his support so firmly behind Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's strategy, Trump is taking a gamble that could suck America even further into the Middle East morass.
Mohammed bin Salman "has escalated Saudi intervention in Yemen, with bombing strikes and air, land and sea blockades. He has tried to quarantine Qatar, hoping to turn it into a submissive satellite state. He has apparently forced the Lebanese prime minister to resign, hoping to destabilize the Shiite-dominated government. All these are part of an effort to fight back against Iran's growing regional influence," Fareed writes.
But "the Saudi strategy does not seem to be working. The war in Yemen has turned into a disaster, creating a failed state on Saudi Arabia's border that is seething with anger against Riyadh. Qatar has not surrendered and doesn't seem likely to anytime soon. So far, the Shiites in Lebanon have acted responsibly, refusing to take the bait and plunge the country into civil war. But everywhere in the Middle East, tensions are rising, sectarianism is gaining ground and, with a couple of miscalculations or accidents, things could spiral out of control."
| | "The Least Transparent War in Recent American History" | | The U.S. war against ISIS is supposed to be the most precise conflict ever. But a civilian death rate more than thirty times that being officially acknowledged by the coalition suggests that, at least in terms of civilian casualties, this might be "the least transparent war in recent American history," Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal report for the New York Times.
"American military planners go to great lengths to distinguish today's precision strikes from the air raids of earlier wars, which were carried out with little or no regard for civilian casualties. They describe a target-selection process grounded in meticulously gathered intelligence, technological wizardry, carefully designed bureaucratic hurdles and extraordinary restraint. Intelligence analysts pass along proposed targets to 'targeteers,' who study 3-D computer models as they calibrate the angle of attack. A team of lawyers evaluates the plan, and — if all goes well — the process concludes with a strike so precise that it can, in some cases, destroy a room full of enemy fighters and leave the rest of the house intact," they write.
But after visiting the sites of almost 150 airstrikes in northern Iraq between April 2016 and June 2017, they found "that one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition."
| | Exit Mugabe, Enter the Crocodile? | | The only thing worse than having Robert Mugabe in charge of Zimbabwe? It could be handing power to the man seen by many as most likely to succeed Mugabe, James Griffiths reports for CNN.
Fear of recently fired Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, nicknamed "the Crocodile," "stems from his position as Mugabe's enforcer and head of the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO), or secret police, and his alleged role in the 1983-84 massacres of the Ndebele ethnic group in Matabeleland, a region in Zimbabwe's southwest that was a center of political opposition to Mugabe's regime," Griffiths writes.
"The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), an international non-partisan organization, estimate at least 20,000 civilians were killed by the CIO and the armed forces."
"In late 2000, a cable written by Earl Irving, then a U.S. diplomat in Harare, described Mnangagwa as 'widely feared and despised throughout the country,' warning he could be 'an even more repressive leader' than Mugabe if he were to succeed him." - Chinese blessing? China has a big economic stake in Africa, including in Zimbabwe. Simon Tisdall writes in The Guardian that a visit to Beijing last week by Zimbabwean military chief General Constantino Chiwenga has prompted speculation that China gave this week's takeover the green light.
"According to Professor Wang Xinsong, a specialist in international development at Beijing Normal University school of social development and public policy, China has been monitoring infighting within the Mugabe regime and the country's faltering economy for some time – and carefully weighing its options," Tisdall writes.
"Beijing was particularly alarmed by an 'indigenization' law effectively seizing majority control of foreign-owned businesses and companies, many of them Chinese."
| | The Country with the Best Brand Is… | | Germany is the country with the world's best brand, after the United States tumbled down the rankings, according to the latest Anholt-GfK Nation Brands Index.
The latest edition of the annual list, which looked at 50 countries and surveyed 20,185 people in 20 panel countries, measures perceptions of nations based on six categories: Culture, Exports, Governance, Immigration-Investment, People and Tourism.
Rounding out the top five countries were France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan; the United States was sixth, scoring highly for culture and exports, but falling from 19th to 23rd on perceptions of governance.
"A similar fall in global perception of the USA was seen following the re-election of George W. Bush, when the USA fell to seventh place. Previously, America has never stayed outside the top ranking for more than a year at a time," said Simon Anholt, who created the index in 2005.
| | The Fundamental Problem with Afghan Policy (and How to Fix it) | | President Trump's minor adjustments to Obama's Afghan policy won't bring stability to the country, write Hy Rothstein and John Arquilla in the Wall Street Journal. Time and again, the Afghan people have demonstrated that they aren't interested in a strong central government. The key to success? "Go local, go small, go long."
"Going local means Afghan stability will depend on local political arrangements rather than control by the government in Kabul. Going small will require a shift to mostly special forces working with and through legitimate local institutions. As for going long, the U.S. should be prepared to stay as long as necessary," they write.
"The effort to reroute the currents of Afghan culture and history by armed force has come undone. There is a way ahead that seeks stability and order, rather than requiring American-style democracy. This way speaks to the Afghans' tradition of decentralized governance…In that troubled land, all counterinsurgency is local, and the American military footprint can be small."
| | America's Seniors: Less Healthy than Their Peers | | America's seniors are sicker, and more likely to skip medication or treatment over cost concerns, than their peers in other rich countries, according to a new report from the Commonwealth Fund.
According to the study of 11 nations, more than a third of America's seniors reported having at least three chronic conditions, compared with a low of 13 percent in New Zealand. Australia, France, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland were the next healthiest, with 20 percent or less in those nations reporting having three or more chronic conditions.
Meanwhile, "[d]espite near-universal coverage through Medicare, U.S. seniors stand out for the financial barriers they experience in getting care. Nearly one-quarter (23%) of older adults in the U.S. said that, in the past year, they had not visited a doctor when sick, had skipped a recommended test or treatment, had not filled a prescription, or had skipped medication doses because of the cost. Five percent or fewer of respondents in France, Norway, Sweden, and the U.K. reported these cost barriers." | | | | | | |
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