Barely noticed, the United States sent a top diplomat to  Europe this week to seek help on an important commitment by President Barack Obama — to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.
   
The trip by veteran envoy Dan Fried to Brussels and Prague is part of efforts to persuade European states to take in some of the 241 remaining detainees at the prison, synonomous for many with rights abuses in the “war on terror” under U.S. President George W. Bush.
   
Europe has long called for the jail to be shut down, but only a few countries — such as France, Portugal and Albania — have  volunteered to resettle any inmates from third countries such as Afghanistan or China.
   
 Time is steadily running out if Obama is to achieve his goal of clearing and closing the prison by next January.  A perceived  lack of European help could sour the much-vaunted new start in transatlantic ties which both sides say they want.
  
But many European officials are asking why they should help the United States out of a hole it dug itself into.
   
The main problem does not involve the small number of  so-called high-value  terror suspects in the camp — they will remain in detention and Washington does not seriously expect anyone to come forward and take them off its hands.
   
Nor does it involve the 17 detainees who have already been cleared for release. The really hot issue is the fate of  the remaining detainees who are not high risk but have not been given the full all-clear.
   
 European officials fear the affair could turn into a legal and political nightmare. Who will take which detainees? Given that much of Europe is now border-free, how will one country reassure its neighbours if it agrees to resettle inmates? And doesn’t the fact that European states have different national policies on surveillance and detention pose extra problems?
   
Worse still, the political fall-out could be devastating. If , for example, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner carried out an attack in Germany just before an election this year, how would Chancellor Angela Merkel explain it to voters? 

Washington knows it won’t be easy to get the Europeans on board. But it says it would be hypocritical for Europe now not to help after all its criticism of Guantanamo.

It also points out that some of the Europeans who are now raising concerns over security were not so long ago saying  most of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners were innocent.
   
Washington hopes to encourage EU justice and home affairs ministers to at least agree a common line on the need to help it with Guantanamo at a regular meeting scheduled for June. Then it will approach individual countries for negotiations on resettling specific cases.
   
Is it time for Europe to come forward and help Obama or is this one file on which it is advised to stay clear?

How times change. Somalia’s new Islamist president has been feted in Ethiopia, whose army drove him from power two years ago - with Washington’s backing - when he headed a sharia courts movement.

Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was greeted with a standing ovation from African Union leaders at a summit in Ethiopia, which pulled the last of its troops out of Somalia last month, leaving the government in control of little beyond parts of Mogadishu. The hardline Islamist al Shabaab militia control much of the rest of southern Somalia.

Somalia was far from being a prominent front in former President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror”, but the reverse Washington suffered there appears to be among its most dramatic. Meanwhile, the past two years have brought at least another 17,400 civilian dead in Somalia and more anarchy that has fuelled a wave of piracy.

Ahmed’s former administration was marked out by both the United States and Ethiopia as being little different to Afghanistan’s Taliban. Hardline members of the group were accused of links to al Qaeda. Now he is widely described by the international community as a “moderate” and he himself has welcomed the new U.S. stance as positive.

"One can say that the U.S. position towards Somalia has become honest," he told the Egyptian newspaper el-Shorouk. "In the framework of the Djibouti negotiations, America has become a force which supports peace."

But Somalia’s new president, chosen by parliamentary vote at the weekend, must now face the al Shabaab militia who grew out of the armed wing of the sharia courts
movement but later split with him. Al Shabaab have vowed to fight and highlighted his support from “non-believers”.

To try to bolster Ahmed, Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete, the African Union chairman, called for U.N. troops to join the 3,500-strong AU peacekeeping force in Somalia. Right now, they cannot do much more than to try to defend themselves.

But some analysts and Ahmed's aides believe that creating a U.N. force would be counterproductive because it could be seen as Western interference and encourage those who fought the invading Ethiopian troops to pursue their struggle.

Getting Somalia's clans behind the government will be another big task, a challenge previous leaders have failed to meet during 18 years of conflict.

What is the chance that Ahmed’s election as president will be able to bring peace to Somalia? What should Africa and the rest of the world do to try to make sure that happens? What do you think?

The slow pace of talks between Hamas and Egyptian mediators on Cairo’s proposal for a Gaza ceasefire is raising speculation in Israel over whether the Islamist group is playing for time, hoping to get a better deal once Barack Obama is sworn in as U.S. president on Tuesday.

Israel also has been in no rush to call off the offensive it began on Dec. 27 with the declared aim of ending Hamas rocket attacks on its southern towns.

It now has only less than a week left to put into motion a threatened third phase of the campaign, an all-out push into densely populated Gaza cities, while its strong ally, President George W. Bush, is still in office.

The bloodshed has opened faultlines in the map of Middle East diplomacy, with the Bush administration in its final week standing behind Israel, Europe pressing Israel to call off its attacks and Arab leaders speaking out against the Jewish state.

For Israel, too, waiting for Obama — who has promised to make Israeli-Palestinian peace an early priority for his administration — could have its advantages.

The way Obama, who last July visited the southern Israeli town of Sderot, a frequent target of Hamas rockets, deals with the Gaza war could set the tone early for his Middle East policy and provide an initial answer to the question being asked in Israel and the Arab world: To what extent, if any, will he soften Bush’s pro-Israeli stance?

Not one but two shoes thrown at the president of the most powerful nation on earth! I will never forget those two or three seconds as those leather shoes — size 10s according to U.S.President George W. Bush — spun through the air, missing the president’s head by inches.

At news conferences in the Middle East, it is common for some less professional and obsequious journalists to leap up and sing the praises of a dignitary at the podium. But when Baghdadiya television journalist Muntather al-Zaidi lurched forward and threw the first shoe, I and everyone else in the room was stunned. There was silence, broken only by the shoe thrower calling Bush a dog. And then another shoe flew, and pandemonium broke loose.

Hitting someone with your shoes is possibly the worst insult in the Middle East. The second worst is probably calling someone a dog. Bush got both.

U.S. and Iraqi security men leapt at the journalist, who yelped and shouted as he was dragged into another room. Bush jokingly said the shoes were size 10s, and a visibly embarrassed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said the shoe thrower was an immature man not worthy of respect.

But for many in Iraq, devastated by years of bloodshed following Bush’s decision to invade in 2003, and for others around the world annoyed by one of the least popular U.S. presidents, Zaidi may be seen as a hero.

Bush and Maliki resumed the news conference after the incident, and answered questions about a recent security pact hailed as a milestone in improving ties between the United States and Iraq — the shoe-thrower’s shouts from another room audible as they spoke.

Bush went on to describe Iraq as having taken an “important step on the road toward an Iraq that can sustain itself, govern itself and defend itself”.

At least one Iraqi on that road will have to walk barefoot for a while — if and when he is allowed to go free.

(Reuters photo: President Bush ducks as a shoe is thrown/Kevin Lamarque)

What does an Israeli prime minister with some time on his hands — and a term about to end — do before he visits the White House for a farewell talk with President George W. Bush?

The same thing that a journalist who flew on his plane to Washington does: tour the capital’s Newseum, a museum dedicated to journalism.
    

Situated off Pennsylvania Avenue, between the White House and Capitol, the museum’s terrace offers a stunning view of Washington’s historic sites — and that’s where, along with a colleague from the French news agency, I ran into Ehud Olmert and his security guards.
    

“What are you doing here,” the head of Olmert’s Israeli security detail asked us, probably wondering who could have leaked the prime minister’s unannounced visit.
    

Simply a coincidence, we replied.

Then in a heavily-guarded, unguarded moment, a visibly puzzled Olmert stopped to chat as a phalanx of U.S. Secret Service and Israeli agents peered at us — two of the five journalists who made the trip with him to Washington.

That’s a far cry from the dozen or so reporters who used to accompany the Israeli leader to the U.S. capital before Olmert and Bush became lame ducks.

(Olmert resigned in September in a corruption scandal but remains prime minister until a new government is formed after Israel’s Feb. 10 parliamentary election.)

“Why did you come all this way?” Olmert asked me. “To cover Bush?”

“Sir,” I replied. “You are the prime minister of Israel and it’s my job to report about you.”

Olmert smiled, patted me on the shoulder, wished me well and continued his tour.

Members of Guinea-Bissau’s unruly armed forces have blotted the military’s record again with another attack against the country’s political institutions. Early on Sunday, Nov. 23, renegade soldiers, their faces hooded, sprayed the Bissau residence of President Joao Bernardo “Nino” Vieira with machine-gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire. The president survived unhurt this latest apparent attempt to topple him.

But The attack underlined the fragility of the small, cashew nut-exporting West African nation, one of the poorest in the world and a former Portuguese colony which has suffered a history of bloody coups, mutinies and uprisings since it won independence in 1974 after a bush war led by Amilcar Cabral. The assault followed parliamentary elections on Nov. 16 which donors were hoping would restore stability and put in place a new government capable of resisting the serious threat posed by powerful Latin American cocaine-trafficking cartels who use Guinea-Bissau as a staging post to smuggle drugs to Europe.

How can a little-known African country like Guinea-Bissau, prostrated by poverty, its government and military undermined by the corrupting influence of multi-million dollar drug-trafficking, dig itself out of underdevelopment?

What should foreign donors do? Invest hundreds of millions of dollars to back security reforms to downsize and modernise the bloated army and struggling police and fund development programmes — even though aid workers say the government and state often appear barely functional and incapable of presenting or implementing programmes.

Or, at a time of global economic crisis when financial resources are stretched and Africa seems filled with conflicts, election disputes and refugees, (Congo, Darfur, Chad, Somalia, Zimbabwe), should the international community look for more deserving (or strategic) cases than little Guinea-Bissau?

What does an Israeli prime minister with some time on his hands — and a term about to end — do before he visits the White House for a farewell talk with President George W. Bush?

The same thing that a journalist who flew on his plane to Washington does: tour the capital’s Newseum, a museum dedicated to journalism.

Situated off Pennsylvania Avenue, between the White House and Capitol, the museum’s terrace offers a stunning view of Washington’s historic sites — and that’s where, along with a colleague from the French news agency, I ran into Olmert and his security guards.

“What are you doing here,” the head of Olmert’s Israeli security detail asked us, probably wondering who could have leaked the prime minister’s unannounced visit.

Simply a coincidence, we replied.

Then in a heavily-guarded, unguarded moment, a visibly puzzled Olmert stopped to chat as a phalanx of U.S. Secret Service and Israeli agents peered at us — two of the five journalists who made the trip with him to Washington.

That’s a far cry from the dozen or so reporters who used to accompany the Israeli leader to the U.S. capital before Olmert and Bush became lame ducks.
 

 (Olmert resigned in September in a corruption scandal but remains prime minister until a new government is formed after Israel’s Feb. 10 parliamentary election.)
    

“Why did you come all this way?” Olmert asked me. “To cover Bush?”

 ”Sir,” I replied. “You are the prime minister of Israel and it’s my job to report about you.”

 Olmert smiled, patted me on the shoulder, wished me well and continued his tour.

European leaders have finally got their act together. After weeks of looking divided over how to tackle the global financial crisis, they agreed on joint measures at  emergency talks in Paris. 

Their meeting followed talks in Washington at the weekend involving G7 finance ministers and officials from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at which governments pledged to support the financial system. U.S. President George W. Bush said he was confident the world’s major economies could overcome the challenges.

But is it enough to stave off the crisis? 

Some equity investors appeared to be comforted. The pan-European FTSEurofirst rose on Monday, U.S. stock futures went up and Asian shares outside Japan, which was closed for a holiday, made gains. 

Just a few days ago, the IMF warned of the danger of financial meltdown but its chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn said on Monday the worst of the crisis was possibly over. 

Many newspapers were cautious. The Toronto Globe and Mail saw hope in the fact that the world’s financial  leaders have started setting aside their differences but said some market participants could be disappointed by the lack of specifics. Floyd Norris wrote in The New York Times that there was no assurance that credit would flow when markets reopen this week.

The Economist said the “dithering” was over but  some problems remained.

Commentators and politicians are united in saying that staying together holds the key to success and that the consequences could be dire if unity does not hold. 

Commentator Will Hutton, writing in The Observer, said: ”I don’t know whether politicians and their advisers can move as quickly as they need in so many areas and collaborate across so many countries to restore stability.”

He added:  ”Without collaboration and leadership, we face disaster.”

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is often accused of ignoring military advice, using too few troops to invade and occupy Iraq and paying the price with a war that has lasted far longer and claimed many more lives than expected.

Despite that criticism, a new book by U.S. journalist Bob Woodward shows President George W. Bush again went against the advice of top military officers in 2007 by ordering a “surge” of extra troops when violence in Iraq was at its worst.

Moreover, the book says Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney circumvented the military chain of command by using retired general Jack Keane to communicate with Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq.

Bush’s supporters say the dramatic reduction in violence since then has fully justified the president’s actions.

Woodward’s book “The War Within” — and excerpts published this week in the Washington Post — certainly raise some interesting questions.

Was Bush right to overrule the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who worried that committing more forces to Iraq would stretch the military to breaking point and leave the United States at risk if a major crisis blew up elsewhere?

Had military leaders become too risk-averse and too wedded to a failed strategy, losing their sense of perspective?

What do these disagreements between administration officials and senior officers say about the state of civil-military relations in the world’s only superpower?

Should the disputes be a cause for concern? Or a sign of healthy debate and strong civilian control of the military?

The thought of Russian warships cruising the waters of the Caribbean instinctively revives memories of such Cold War episodes as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Russia is sending a heavily armed nuclear-powered cruiser and other ships, aircraft and troops for a joint naval exercise with Venezuela, its first big manoeuvres in the United States’ self-declared backyard since the end of the Cold War.

It is extremely unlikely the deployment will provoke a crisis as dangerous and dramatic as 1962, but it is still an irritant to Washington.

Venezuela under President Hugo Chavez has replaced Fidel Castro’s Cuba as its chief bugbear in Latin America.

Spouting anti-imperialist rhetoric, Chavez has led a socialist revolution aimed at countering a century of U.S. influence — some might say meddling — in the region. He counts as allies leaders such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales as well as many poor people. 

He has backed up his actions with largesse from Venezuela’s oil wealth. Ironically, a lot of those dollars come from the United States. Venezuela is its fifth-largest oil supplier, a trade relationship which has hobbled Washington’s reactions to Chavez’s adventures.

Venezuela has already bought fighter jets, submarines and guns from Russia. And add to the equation Venezuela’s burgeoning friendship with Iran, another bete noire for the Americans.

Chavez seems to enjoy goading the Bush administration almost for the fun of it. He has variously called President George W. Bush a donkey, a drunk, and in a U.N. speech, the Devil.”

The naval exercises with Russia will not be as easy for Washington to brush off as the name-calling.

Relations between Washington and Moscow are tense because of Russia’s intervention in Georgia in August. The Kremlin was angered by the United States’ sending a naval flotilla to the Black Sea to show support for Georgia.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev even asked how Washington would feel if Russian sent aid vessels to the Caribbean.

During the Cold War, Russian had a substantial military presence in Cuba and was involved behind the scenes in the Central American wars of the 1980s. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, all that ended.

But Russian officials have made it clear recently that Moscow is ready to play a role on the world stage again.

Meanwhile the United States’ Fourth Fleet this year began patrolling Latin American waters for the first time in 50 years, a move that Chavez denounced but that has also concerned moderate countries such as Brazil.

The Venezuela-Russia exercises are due to take place days after the U.S. presidential election - an event that will complicate any response from Washington and at the same time divert world attention.