Hossam el-Hamalawy
Via Al-Jazeera:
The US war in Iraq is lost and a further build-up of US troops in the country will not recover the situation, the senior Democrat in the US senate has said.
“This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week,” Harry Reid, the senate Democratic majority leader, told reporters.
In the midst of our country’s constitutional massacre, and as we embrace a “September 1981”-style crackdown on dissent, Condi has arrived in Egypt to meet Arab Foreign Ministers and Mubarak–part of her plan to “rally Arab moderate states for regional peace,” as Western news reports say.
Moderates?! Regimes with security services that sodomize detainees, lock up secularists for their beliefs, imprison liberals on fabricated charges, brutalize leftists in street demos, try Islamists in martial courts, turn their countries into constitutional Gestapo states–and Condi still regards them as moderates?
From Reuters:
A policy plan signed by Egypt and the European Union, worth 558 million euros ($733 million) to Egypt over four years, has much more carrot than stick when it comes to politics and human rights, experts said on Wednesday.
Political analysts and politicians said they doubted the European Union (EU) would ever threaten to withhold any of the aid money to punish the Egyptian government for any abuses.
“The aim is not to penalize but rather to encourage. The European approach will be very patient, very incremental and very supportive,” said a diplomat who asked not to be named.
The European diplomat said the money was already allocated to sectors and programs agreed by the two sides and the Europeans had no intention of linking it to performance benchmarks.