The blue-domed memorial Saddam Hussein built in Baghdad to honour Baath party founder Michel Aflaq, a Syrian Christian who started the movement that dominated Iraq for decades and governs Syria today, has been turned into a shopping centre for U.S. soldiers.
Aflaq’s tomb, sitting at the centre of a vault adorned with Koranic verses and Arabesque designs, has been boarded up to make way for a barber shop, a store selling kitschy Iraq souvenirs, a pirate DVD vendor and a ring of other stores.

The new mall at Aflaq’s tomb, located on what is now a U.S. military base in central Baghdad, has thus sealed off a powerful symbol of the deep, and often strained, shared history between Iraq and Syria, one which is being tested in a new feud between Baghdad and Damascus.

Last month, Syria and Iraq recalled their ambassadors after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused Syria of sheltering mebbers of the Iraqi Baath party whom he blames for backing attacks that killed around 100 people in Baghdad last month.

The Aug. 19 bombings marked a U-turn in the slow improvement of relations between Iraq and Syria, which for decades had stunted diplomatic relations. Since 2003, they have been at odds over U.S. and Iraqi accusations that Damascus has allowed foreign insurgents to stream across its border into Iraq.

Damascus refused Maliki’s demand that Syria turn over Iraqi Baathists believed to be behind the August attacks and accused Iraq of being ungrateful for its efforts to care for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi war refugees now living in Syria.

But Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be unnerved by Maliki’s request at the United Nations for a formal inquiry into the attacks.

Shining a global spotlight on Syria for a second time - in addition to the U.N. tribunal into the death of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri - must be an uncomfortable prospect for Assad’s secretive, controlling regime.

The Iraq-Syria squabble also underscores the difficulties that Maliki, and Iraq generally, are having in dealing with powerful elements from the Iraqi Baath party, many living in Syria and Jordan, ahead of an election next year and beyond.

The United States has been pushing Maliki to bring a wider spectrum of Iraqis into efforts to reconcile the country, and has even held unilateral talks with former Baath party members who might one day try to take part in the political process.

But Maliki, a member of Iraq’s Shi’ite Arab majority marginalised under Saddam’s Sunni Arab-led regime, spent decades fighting the Baath party - at least in part from exile in Syria - and it will be hard for Sunnis or Shi’ites to easily forget the sectarian crimes of the last six years.

Which brings us back to Aflaq. Born in Damascus in 1910, Aflaq was educated in Paris before he helped found the Baath party in the 1940s, hoping to wed Arab culture with modern, secularist politics and a rejection of western imperialism.

The Baath party took over in Damascus in 1963, but Aflaq later fled to Baghdad and aligned himself with the rival Iraqi branch of the party. Saddam gave Aflaq, his ideological compass during 24 years in power, a place of honour in Iraq and named him the party’s general secretary. In 1989, Aflaq died in Paris - Saddam claimed he was secretly converted to Islam before his death - and he was buried in Baghdad.

During that time, Syria and Iraq spied on and used political dissidents as leverage against each other. What the two countries may share most now is the need to climb down from their latest neighbourly crisis. Assad’s government is reaching out to the West and Washington, under President Barack Obama, is seeking to engage Damascus for the first time in eight years.

Maliki, meanwhile, is facing pushback on his tough Syria stance from senior officials who could well turn out to be rivals in January’s national elections.

Struggling to stamp out a weakened but active insurgency, Maliki may also not want to risk anything that will further deteriorate security and undermine his main selling point - improved security - when voters go to the polls in January.

Insiders say Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was rather reticent and stiff in public when he took the job in 1997. He’d spent decades below the radar in Egypt’s foreign service, U.S. academia and the U.N. nuclear watchdog as head of the legal and external relations divisions.

But Mohamed ElBaradei evolved into a politically outspoken tribune for international peace and fair play.

That reputation grew as he challenged George W. Bush’s neocons over bogus evidence of mass-destruction weaponry they used to invade Iraq, and their policy of threatening rather than negotiating with Iran, which seemed to backfire by encouraging, not dissuading, Tehran to build up nuclear capability.

ElBaradei’s campaigning for negotiated non-proliferation, disarmament and development through peaceful uses of the atom earned a Nobel Peace Prize for him and the IAEA in 2005.
   
Now, as he prepares to retire in November, the 66-year-old, self-described “secular pope” has gone into legacy-building overdrive. Media interviews have proliferated with cable TV or web magazine outlets that air or publish his remarks unedited.

This week ElBaradei went public even in private, expounding off-the-cuff and very undiplomatically at a closed door meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors, then authorising his remarks to be “leaked” to the media outside.

At other governors’ meetings dealing with hot-button issues like Iran’s stonewalling of IAEA investigators, I had to chase participants by sms or after-hours phone calls just to get tiny,
broken snippets of what ElBaradei had said inside.

This time, whole transcripts of his interventions on the boardroom floor found their way to nuclear beat reporters.

ElBaradei pulled no punches. And the pickings were rich.

On Tuesday, he lambasted the governors for their protracted failure to reach consensus on a big budget rise he wants to upgrade a crumbling inspections regime he said threatens to turn the IAEA into a laughing stock among nuclear proliferators.

“What you are reaping today is what you have sown for the last 20 years of zero real growth budgets,” he said.

“The whole idea that now we have to go out and borrow or hold out our hands and say, ‘Please give us some money to do safety and security,’ is really a bastardisation of an international organisation,” ElBaradei fumed.

“Today our lab lacks the equipment to do sensitive particle analysis. How can I come here and tell you I have credible conclusions on issues that have tio do with war and peace?

“If you come to me and say cut here or cut there, I and my colleagues will not assume responsibility if in a couple of years from now we see another Chernobyl, or a nuclear terrorist attack, or a clandestine nuclear programme.”

On Wednesday, ElBaradei dispensed with diplomatic caveats by telling the BBC it was “his gut feeling” that Iran “definitely would like to have the technology that would enable it to have nuclear weapons if they decided to do so”.

To IAEA governors, he said the IAEA’s mission to prevent nuclear weapons spreading to unstable regions was “going around in circles” because it lacked enforcement tools and world powers
had not negotiated seriously with states like Iran, or shared intelligence with U.N. inspectors in a timely way.

“We are sometimes called the ‘watchdog,’ but we don’t bark at all if we don’t have the legal authority to do our work.

“The U.N. Security Council should not necessarily mean just sanctions. It is supposed to be a forum to find solutions,” he said. “When there’s no dialogue, we come to a standstill. We are completely gridlocked in North Korea and Iran.”
   
On Thursday, simmering tensions between Israel and ElBaradei boiled over at the Board when the Jewish state’s envoy accused him of political bias and lacking assertiveness in his probe into an alleged secret plutonium reactor site in Syria.
   
That was a “totally distorted” position, ElBaradei shot back. He upbraided Israel for trying to tell the IAEA how to do its verification job but hindering it from doing that job by having bombed the purported reactor to ruin in 2007 before alerting inspectors first to check the evidence.

“(Israel says) we refrain from using tools. Israel is not even a member of the Non-Proliferation Regime, to tell us what tools are available to us. You cannot sit on the fence, making use of the system, without being accountable.

“To say I am biased, I won’t dignify that with a response.”

On Thursday, the IAEA governors, citing rights disputes, derailed ElBaradei’s campaign for a global nuclear fuel supply bank that would reduce the appeal of proliferation-prone enrichment in unstable states.

It was a stinging setback to his vision of stemming the spread of nuclear arms knowhow while sharing atomic energy for peaceful purposes in a safe, accountable way.
   
This time, ElBaradei was silent.

But he still has a few more months to weigh in on this and all his passionately-felt themes of war and peace — and later when he will be in demand on the global lecture circuit.

(International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei attends a board of Governors meeting at Vienna’s UN headquarters June 15, 2009. REUTERS/Herwig Prammer (AUSTRIA POLITICS ENERGY HEADSHOT))

The U.N. nuclear non-proliferation watchdog assiduously guards its impartiality as it monitors and investigates disputed activity in Iran and Syria, with suspicious Western powers impatient for the inspectors to draw conclusions.

So the International Atomic Energy Agency typically puts what have become keenly anticipated, quarterly reports on Iran and Syria through many painstaking drafts before they see the light of day, to help ensure that not a single word can be misunderstood, misinterpreted or turned to political advantage.

But the IAEA had to scramble this month to stay the course amid growing Western edginess over Iran’s defiant advances towards nuclear capacity with possible bomb applications, as well as a perceived Syrian nuclear cover-up.

The U.N. watchdog had to do battle with politically charged headlines and alarmist commentary both because of unexplained references in its latest reports and things that were left out.

Unguarded remarks coaxed from senior U.N. officials by aggressive nuclear beat reporters also stirred the pot. First, we pounced on a figure of 1,010 kg of low-enriched uranium (LEU) accumulated by Iran for future nuclear fuel. Our antennae were twitching since this echoed U.S. estimates of the minimum LEU Iran would need to reprocess into high-enriched uranium (HEU) for a bomb, if it so chose.

Yet, the science is inexact. Other estimates range up to 1,700 kg, depending on factors like quality of uranium, natural loss or wastage of material from further enrichment and so on.

Such nuances got lost in U.S. and European headlines:

“IRAN HAS ENRICHED ENOUGH URANIUM FOR BOMB, IAEA SAYS”.

In fact, the IAEA had not said that. It was just an unnamed U.N. official who, pressed by reporters to draw conclusions, said: “Do they have enough LEU to produce a significant quantity of HEU? Yes. But it is theoretical. They’re not there yet.”

Still, that looked to some as if the IAEA was passing judgment on a nation’s nuclear capability. Iran protested because that is outside the IAEA’s technical mandate, which to safeguard nuclear items from diversion into bombmaking.

His “yes” whipped up fear in a West convinced Iran is bent on building The Bomb, despite a dearth of hard evidence. In fact, for the security hedge Iran desires to turn the tables on U.S.-Israeli predominance in the Middle East, all it needs is a perceived ABILITY to build a nuclear weapon.

That is entirely legal since uranium enrichment technology also generates electricity, the stated goal of Iran’s programme.

Since enrichment is the toughest of a good dozen technical steps entailed in creating a bomb, Western concerns now fixate on the size of Iran’s LEU stockpile. And that figured in a second ruckus arising from the IAEA’s report.

Eagle-eyed U.S. nuclear reporters, comparing figures with those in the IAEA’s prior report, found that Iran’s estimate of its LEU stockpile was 209 kg less than the IAEA’s own inventory check. Answering a question, a U.N. official said this “physical inventory verification” (PIV) was done just once a year.

Headlines blared: “IRAN UNDERSTATES URANIUM STOCKS”. Alarm bells rang: could Iran be misleading the IAEA about its LEU stocks and squirrelling some away for secret conversion into HEU?

The IAEA was taken aback, wrongfooted by its failure to acknowledge and explain the unusually large discrepancy in the report, and it took three days to issue a clarifying statement. No, it said, this was only an honest mistake by Iran down to technical inexperience and Iran is cooperating well to improve its future estimates. The IAEA assured that all LEU was under constant agency surveillance. Not everyone was convinced.

“(Since a PIV) is conducted once a year…, given the time taken to process the results, it means a diversion occurring just after a PIV might not be detected for 13 or 14 months,” wrote James Acton in the influential Arms Control Wonk web blog.

Fellow ACW blogger Jeffrey Lewis saw no reason for fuss. “Another IAEA report on Iran. Cue the panic…This is going to frighten you, but large industrial processes are not measured in bomb units, even though this would be awesome,” he wrote. Alluding to the LEU, Lewis added: “If you aren’t sure how much he weighs, Elvis is still in the building.”

As for Syria, a rare impromptu disclosure of investigative findings omitted from the IAEA’s formal report created a media splash and a protest from Damascus, which denies allegations it tried to build a plutonium-producing reactor in secret.

Answering a reporter’s query, a U.N. official said graphite traces were found in soil samples taken at a site where Washington says Syria almost built a graphite-core reactor with North Korean help before Israel bombed it to ruin in 2007.

Some reporters including me led their stories with the graphite, understandably because this was news. We also quoted the U.N. official saying it was to early to tell if there was a nuclear link with the graphite, an element with many other uses.

But that qualifier escaped many punters. The IAEA was forced to send a memo to its 35-nation governing board a day later spelling out that no graphite-nuclear link had been established
“at present”.

For its part, Syria’s state news agency said no suspicious graphite had been or would be found. Syrian officials denied any graphite was found, suggesting the IAEA was lying.

But as the last week made clear, politics, paranoia and conspiracy theories can sometimes make it hard to get the whole truth across when it comes to the IAEA’s complex Iran and Syria investigations.

(Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (C) visits the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, 350 km (217 miles) south of Tehran, April 8, 2008. Iran has begun installing 6,000 new centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant, Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday, defying the West which fears Tehran is trying to build nuclear bombs. Picture taken on April 8, 2008. REUTERS/Presidential official website/Handout (IRAN). FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS.)

    British Foreign Secretary David Miliband hopes his Middle East trip will help nudge Syria away from supporting the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, but on a visit to Damascus he let slip that other Syrian allegiances were troubling him.

    “People on the streets wanted to talk about politics but also about football,” he told reporters after a tour in which he sampled ice cream from century-old shop in the heart of the ancient capital.

    “There were not enough Arsenal supporters and too many Manchester United supporters,” he said.

    Miliband, a keen Arsenal fan, is not shy about expressing his views on football. When Arsenal unceremoniously exited the Champions League in April after a 4-2 defeat to Liverpool, he criticised the Swedish referee on his Foreign Office blog and accused a Dutch player of faking a fall.

    But he was more conciliatory in Damascus, perhaps because of the hospitality of his Syrian hosts.

    “The ice cream was extremely good and the generosity of the ice cream store owners also extremely broad,” said Miliband, who struggled with a huge cone of ice cream served up Bekdash, which has been making the traditional pistachio variety for over a century.

    “They gave ice cream to all the delegation and also to the security guards.”

   So much of what passes for news in the Middle East is enveloped in shadow, with even seasoned observers reduced to weighing claim and counter-claim with little hard evidence to go on. Yet another example is the U.S. raid across the Syrian border on Sunday.
   Syria says the attack by U.S. forces inside Syria was a “terrorist aggression” which targeted a farm and killed eight civilians.
    A U.S. official said the raid by U.S. forces is believed to have killed a major al Qaeda operative, known as Abu Ghadiya, who helped smuggle foreign fighters into Iraq.
    But do we really know what happened?
    We do know that following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of  Iraq, Syria, which feared it was next on Washington’s list of rogue states for regime change, permitted the transit of Jihadi volunteers for the Iraqi insurgency fighting the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
    We also know that there have been similar attacks by U.S. forces near the Iraqi border, and also in Afghanistan and across the Afghan-Pakistan border. In at least two instances these operations have mistakenly hit a wedding party and civilian houses despite claims they were al Qaeda hideouts.
    We also know that the U.S. military has at least twice in the past carried out attacks across the Syrian border but this was the first time the obsessively secretive Syrian regime has gone public with it and allowed camera crews to reach the area and film the aftermath.
    Damascus is resentful because, as part of its attempt to improve its image internationally, it has clamped down on al Qaeda-inspired Islamist militants. It feels its efforts are not being recognised by Washington and that the Jihadis  are seeking reprisals.
   “I can tell you and explain that the terrorist explosion in Damacus in September happened because we tightened our border with Iraq. They (Jihadis) wanted revenge for what we are doing. Unfortunately they are not the only revenging party. Of course the Americans tried to ‘reward’ us by carrying out this (attack) ,” said Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem.
    Given the credibility of all parties  in this affair it is going to be difficult to get to the the bottom of what happened.

In downtown Beirut, resurrected from the rubble of the 1975-90 civil war, one is spoilt for choice of smart restaurants, trendy bars and lively clubs. Performances by sexy Lebanese divas and belly dancers contribute generously to Lebanon’s gross domestic product by attracting Gulf Arab tourists enchanted with Lebanese talent and beauty — not necessarily in that order.

There is isn’t a single international designer who has not found his or her way to Beirut’s elegant boutiques and jewellery shops. On the other hand, Lebanese designers such as Elie Saab are dressing Hollywood stars these days.

On the streets of Beirut one can see the latest Mercedes, Jaguars and BMWs jostling with Maseratis and Ferraris, even before they appear in Europe. Appearances aside, Lebanon has one of the best-educated peoples in the Middle East, with its young men and women having a global reach into the worlds of business, banking and academia.

It was comforting to see downtown Beirut teeming again with tourists enjoying the delights the city can offer. Beaches were packed with Beirutis in bikinis and hotels were overbooked with returning visitors who left during the crisis that erupted between the pro-Iranian opposition led by Lebanon’s influential Shi’ite Hezbollah and the U.S.-backed Sunni-led Lebanese government after the assassination in 2005 of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. This crisis has been put on hold following a Qatari-brokered agreement in May.

Yet underneath the glitzy facade is a country mirroring the real currents of militancy and Sunni-Shi’ite sectarianism unleashed by the Iraq war.

The conflict in Iraq has brought back to the surface the historical Sunni-Shi’ite feud throughout the Middle East. It overthrew a Sunni dictator, brought Iraq’s Shi’ites to power and tipped the balance of power in favour of Shi’ite Iran and its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

This, in turn, has incensed Sunni Arab countries and left a bitter legacy across the Arab world, Lebanon in particular which is traditionally a proxy battleground where regional forces settle their disputes.

In Lebanon, the Sunni-Shi’ite rivalry is in danger of taking a vicious turn. Fundamentalist Sunni Salafi groups have established a foothold in the northern city of Tripoli, which admittedly had been a hotbed for Sunni Islamist groups in the 1980s before they were crushed by Syria, then the dominant power in Lebanon.

Now these forces have found their way to the southern city of Sidon and to eastern Lebanon and some Palestinian refugee camps.

Added to the Iraq war factor is the humiliation inflicted on Sunni prestige in May by Hezbollah when it overran West Beirut, traditionally a Sunni bastion, after a row with the government. That proved without a doubt that they called the shots in the country.

As a result, Sunni groups are seething, with some tilting towards radical Islamism.

The growing influence of these groups is no longer just in the poor neighbourhoods of Tripoli but it has reached the more affluent parts of the southern port city of Sidon — through mosques and preachers setting out to indoctrinate young Sunnis.

A friend recently recounted how her nephew and some of his friends, all American-educated and from affluent Sunni conservative families, were victims of this indoctrination and turned into zealots after attending prayers at a mosque near Sidon.

“Now he spends his days in his room reading the Koran and listening to militant chants. In his eyes we are non-Muslims and following the infidel way of life. Nobody is able to communicate with him or get through to him,” the friend told me.

Lebanon, it seems, is being used once again by its politicians and their regional patrons as a laboratory.

Anti-Syrian Sunni Lebanese politicians, backed by Sunni heavyweight Saudi Arabia, have not only ignored the growing influence of Salafi groups but have courted them in some instances in their attempt to roll back the rising tide of Shi’ite influence embodied by Hezbollah.

Syria, which after the 2003 U.S.-led war encouraged and facilitated the flow of jihadists to Iraq and into Lebanon, has warned of growing Islamist militancy in north Lebanon and said a vehicle used in a suicide attack in Damascus last week had crossed into Syria from a neighbouring country, implying it could have been Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq.

With these local and regional actors playing with fire, how long before their policies backfire

One of the problems with countries like Syria - secretive and authoritarian - is that whenever a bomb goes off or someone is assassinated, the list of possible suspects is extensive.

One can draw up a long list of enemies who could have plotted and carried out Saturday’s rare car bomb attack on a major road near a Syrian state security complex and an intersection leading to a famous Shi’ite Muslim shrine. The blast, which killed 17 people including a brigadier general and his son, poses another test to Syria’s reputation for keeping a tight grip on dissent and maintaining stability in a troubled area. 

High on any list of possible perpetrators are Sunni Salafi jihadis active in Syria now, and who for years were able to cross through the Syrian borders into Iraq to fight U.S. troops. This stopped recently when Damascus tightened its borders following pressure from Iraq and the United States and opted for a policy of detente and moderation starting with indirect peace talks with Israel through Turkish mediation and a diplomatic drive to end its international isolation.

The jihadis, angry at Syria cutting off their routes, relaunching peace talks with the Jewish state and detaining their militants, could have turned their guns against Damascus. And this could have involved a mix of personnel — foreign expertise helping local Islamists.

Another motive for the latest attack could be Sunni-Alawite tensions in Lebanon. Sunni militant groups based in northern Lebanon have been fighting a sectarian war with Lebanon’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam which has close links to Syria, whose ruling elite has been dominated by minority Alawites for over four decades.

Syria said an Islamist suicide bomber was responsible for the attack and that the vehicle had entered Syria from a neighbouring Arab country on Sept 26. It did not name the country but Syria’s Arab neighbours are Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan.

Assad, whose country has dominated Lebanon for three decades and was forced to withdraw its troops after the assassination of former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, warned this month of a danger from what he called foreign-backed Sunni extremists in the predominantly Sunni city of Tripoli. He called for a solution to “the rising threat” of Islamist militants in the city.

The bombing was reminiscent to attacks that were carried out in the past by Syria’s Islamist opposition led by the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood which has been locked in a bloody feud with the secular government since the 1980s when late President Hafez al-Assad launched a major crackdown against their followers and supporters in the northern city of Hama.

That left thousands of Muslim Brotherhood activists dead — some estimates are as high as 20,000 –  languishing in prisons or forced underground.

A riot by Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists at a military prison near Damascus in July suggests the bitter fight between the authorities and the Brotherhood is far from over. There were conflicting accounts of the incident but human rights groups said Syrian security forces killed dozens of prisoners during the riot at Sidnaya prison.

A Syrian official said the disturbances began when Islamist inmates took prison officers hostages and set conditions for their release. Special anti-riot units were brought in from Damascus to end the riot which was quashed violently, according to various accounts.

Syria, which has been ruled by the secular Baath Party since 1963, has sometimes used Islamist groups as proxies to pursue its interests in neighbouring countries, even though it showed no mercy domestically to the 1982 uprising at Hama by the Muslim Brotherhood.

It will likely pursue the hard line policy against militants but Saturday’s attack, which follows the assassination of the military commander of Lebanon’s Hezbollah in Damascus and a senior military aide to President Assad in northern Syria earlier this year, has dented Syria’s watertight security image.

The killing of Imad Moughniyah, in particular, who was on Washington’s most wanted list for two decades for hijackings and suicide bombings against U.S. Western and Israeli targets worldwide, raised serious questions about whether the Assad regime was master in its own house. 

More generally, the recent attacks suggest that Syria itself may become victim to its government’s dabbling in jihadism, like so many other sorcerers’ apprentices across the region who tried to harness Islamist militancy for their own ends only for it to blow back on them.

Iraq’s leaders have overcome many hurdles in their struggle to rebuild their country after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003.  But agreeing on the fate of the “ethnic tinderbox” of oil-producing Kirkuk is a particularly testing one.

Why has Kirkuk proven to be such an obstacle? For many, settling its fate seems to be an easy task.

The dispute largely revolves around Kurdish demands to incorporate the city into their autonomous northern Iraq region.  Arabs and Turkmens want the city to remain under the control of the Iraqi government as it has always been.

For an outsider the dispute might seem to be an administrative question of who will manage the city but Kirkuk’s fate has taken on national and regional dimensions since U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam. It has fuelled the ethnic conflict between Arabs
and Kurds and drawn in regional powers, especially neighbouring Turkey.

Kurds look at the city inhabited by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens as their historic capital, while Arabs and Turkmen argue it equally belongs to them.

While Sunnis and Shi’ite Arabs are locked in a power struggle across the country, they are united in rejecting ceding the city to the Kurdish autonomous region.

But Kirkuk is more than a piece of real estate inheritance. The city sits on a sea of “black gold” — Iraq’s biggest oil field, which has become more lucrative with crude prices above $100 a barrel.

From a regional perspective, Ankara opposes Kurdish control of Kirkuk not only out of concern for the rights of fellow Turkmens in Iraq but also because it will bolster its own Kurdish minority’s demands for autonomy.

Watching an independent Kurdistan gradually taking shape across its border, Ankara fears that Kirkuk’s oil could strengthen the autonomous region in the face of a weak central government in Baghdad, and realise Kurdish aspirations for a region-wide Kurdish state, possibly encompassing southern Turkey and parts of Iran and Syria.

After years of trying and failing, Iraqi leaders are trying to reassure friends and foes that they are close to a deal on the future of Kirkuk. But even if parliament adopts a compromise hammered out behind closed doors, it is difficult to see how it will be implemented.

The European-Mediterranean summit in Paris might have produced grand projects ranging from cleaning up the Mediterranean sea to using North Africa’s sunshine to generate power. But that is is not what it will be remembered for.

It will be remembered for the glorious welcome it bestowed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who until yesterday was persona non-grata in the West, an autocrat leading a pariah regime, which many believe orchestrated the 2005 killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.  

Assad was the star of the show, which sealed a new detente between Syria and Europe, with the Syrian and Israeli leaders sitting at the same table for the first time.

So what happened? And why are things finally looking up for Bashar? What lay behind this sudden turn in his fortunes? Are Bashar and his government really off the hook?       Is it all forgotten because Assad relaunched indirect peace talks with Israel and gave his blessing to a Qatari-mediated accord that ended Lebanon’s political crisis, allowing the election of a Lebanese president? After all, the new government was in Syria’s favour.

Or is it as some experts commented because Assad proved once again, like his father late President Hafez al-Assad before him, that there won’t be any stability or peace in the region without Syria, that Syria –  with its strong links with Iran, Lebanon’s Shi’ite Hezbollah, the Islamist Hamas movement and a string of hired guns — still  calls the shots and could act as a spoiler if ostracised? 

Some observers even speculated that there was collusion in Damascus for the killing in February of Imad Moughniyah, the chief of Hezbollah’s security network and an agent of Iran who topped the U.S. most wanted list for 25 years.

Those familiar with Syrian techniques joked that Syria keeps resorting to the same old get-out-of-jail-free-cards and dodges to get out of crises with the West.

In the 1980’s,  for example, Syria was shunned by the West for its alleged links to an El Al bombing plot in London, its alliance with Iran against Arabs in the Iran-Iraq war, and because of its support for Shi’ite Islamist bombings of U.S. and French targets in Lebanon.

Yet it regained its place in the Arab fold –  and the good grace of Washington – by joining the U.S.-led alliance that ended Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Syria was well rewarded - the US gave it a free hand to operate in Lebanon and Arab states gave aid and investment.  
Syrian journalists accompanying Assad were delighted by their leader’s confident performance at the Elysee Palace. He shared a table with Sarkozy, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman and the Qatari ruler Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. Yet most journalists directed their questions to Assad.

Heading out of the palace one Syrian journalist joked with a colleague: “Our Lebanese friends will be upset because the story is no longer the Hariri tribunal”.

Assad and his glamorous wife Asma savoured their moment of glory. Both were invited to stay on for Bastille Day.

“Bashar is here to stay…It is a very different situation. We saw lots of self-assurance and self-confidence. He was conducting himself with a statesman-like appearance,” one analyst said.  

Is Syria back in the fold or is full rehabilitation a long way off? Has Assad outsmarted Syria’s critics?

Russia’s angry response to an accord between Washington and Prague on building part of a U.S. missile defence shield in the Czech Republic is reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Cold War. Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says Moscow still wants talks on the missile shield, his Foreign Ministry has threatened a “military-technical” response if the shield is deployed.

That phrase could have come straight out of the Soviet lexicon and seems more at home in the second half of the last century than now. Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer called it psychological pressure to try to encourage opposition to the missile system among Europeans, and described it as “the same sort that was used in the 1980s by the Soviet Union when the United States deployed cruise missiles in Europe.”

We are, of course, a long way from the tensions of the Cold War. But the dispute is reminiscent of the war of words between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1980s over another missile defence system — the Strategic Defence Initiative proposed by Ronald Reagan. His dream of a partly space-based missile system, otherwise known as Star Wars after George Lucas’ 1977 film, never became a reality but the row over it plagued Soviet-U.S. relations for years.

The disagreement over the missile defence system that George W. Bush now wants to be partly based in Europe risks having a similar impact on U.S.-Russian relations. Perhaps fittingly, it has been referred to as Son of Star Wars.

I was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1980s when the dispute over Star Wars was at its height. The disagreements were clear. Reagan wanted to deploy a multi-billion-dollar land- and space-based shield to shoot down incoming missiles. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said the programme would disrupt the nuclear balance and fuel an arms race in space, and expressed  hope that Europe would not become “a testing-ground for the Pentagon’s doctrines of a limited nuclear war”. 

The disagreement led to the collapse of a 1986 superpower summit in Iceland.

When I was back in Moscow in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin were at loggerheads over U.S. plans for a Star Wars-style missile defence umbrella, even though Clinton had pulled the plug on Star Wars in 1993. Moscow said plans to develop the new missile defence system would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement Moscow saw as a cornerstone of global security.

Similar issues hung over Vladimir Putin’s presidency and now threaten to strike a severe blow to hopes of an improvement in U.S.-Russian ties at the very start of Medvedev’s presidency.

Washington says it needs a missile defence system based partly in Europe to provide protection against any attack on  European or U.S. targets by rogue states such as Iran, which tested new long- and medium-range missiles on Wednesday. Russia says the missiles could threaten its own defences and might become a bigger threat over time it if the system expanded.

In the 1980s, Moscow was worried about a project that would have based missiles outside the former Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. It is now concerned about a system that would be even closer to home. A radar tracker is to be placed on Czech soil and, if a deal is reached with Warsaw, 10 interceptor missiles could be installed in Poland. Both Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia were members of the Warsaw Pact.

If Poland does not reach an agreement with the United States, Lithuania has been suggested an alternative site for the interceptors. That would be an even less welcome prospect for Moscow because the Baltic state was part of the Soviet Union. Little surprise, then, that Medvedev took a firm line on the issue in comments he made at the group of Eight summit in Japan.

But Moscow could risk shooting itself in the foot by reverting to rhetoric that harks back to the Cold War. Michal Kaminski, an aide to Polish President Lech Kaczynski said on Wednesday Russia’s reaction was unacceptable. He said it showed Poland should “strengthen our alliance with the United States because beyond our eastern border there are politicians who use a language we thought had vanished many years ago, the language of might and imperial ambitions.”