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?

It has been a tense game of poker between India and Pakistan since the Mumbai attacks. On the face of it, India had the much stronger hand -- not least because it captured one of the attackers alive and got him to confess to being trained in Pakistan.

But has it played its cards well?

Some analysts say India overplayed its hand in the initial days after the attack by saying the military option remained open.

That allowed Pakistan to cloud the issue and raise the spectre of an Indian military strike -- neatly uniting the country behind the army and against India.

One former foreign secretary told me India had made a mistake on those initial days, by making a threat it was not prepared to carry out and allowing Pakistan the chance to play the victim.

Since then, New Delhi has been much more restrained and cautious in what it has said, admirably so according to diplomats and analysts I have spoken to. On Monday it presented its carefully complied dossier of evidence to Pakistan and other countries.

But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised the stakes again this week by suggesting that the Pakistani "agencies" must have known about and supported the plan to attack Mumbai.

Pakistan has once again pounced on this claim, accusing Singh of engaging in a propaganda war.

Last year India had the backing of the U.S. in its allegation that the ISI was involved in the attack on its embassy in Kabul.

But this time around, diplomatic sources say New Delhi has yet to prove to them that the ISI was involved.

"In their oral presentation, Indian officials told the envoys of their belief that the ISI was indeed involved in the incident," Siddharth Varadarajan wrote in the Hindu newspaper.

"Thought his claim was not contested, at least one nation, the United States, has told India it is still not in a position to share this perception."

I wonder now if Singh might have overplayed his hand again. Should he have stuck to what can be proved in a court of law, so that he retains the moral high ground and gives Pakistan no room to wriggle out?

Or is he simply saying what everybody knows -- that the ISI has links to extreme Islamist groups and must have at least known this attack was being planned?

India is piling on the diplomatic pressure to convince the international community to lean on Pakistan to crack down on Islamist militants blamed by New Delhi for the Mumbai attacks.

According to the Times of India, "India has made it clear to the U.S. and Iran as well as Pakistan's key allies, China and Saudi Arabia, that they need to do more to use their clout to pressure Pakistan into acting..." The Press Trust of India (PTI), quoted by The Hindu, said India had used a visit by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal to Delhi to drive home the same message.

As discussed previously on this blog, in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, India's response was to look to the United States to put pressure on Pakistan. It also appears to have won some support from Russia, whose officials said publicly that the attacks were funded by Dawood Ibrahim, an underworld don who India says lives in Pakistan. China, Pakistan's traditional ally, supported the United Nations Security Council in  blacklisting the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity accused of being a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba.  China's Foreign Minister has also telephoned his counterparts in India and Pakistan urging dialogue, according to Xinhua. 

And to complete the tour of the permanent members of the Security Council, Britain blamed Pakistan-based militants for the Mumbai attacks, while France has also called on Pakistan to take action.

That's a fairly broad consensus in favour of diplomatic pressure. There certainly seem to be more players more visibly involved than in 2001/2002 when India and Pakistan came to the brink of war over an attack on the Indian parliament that India blamed on Pakistan-based militants. You might therefore be tempted to argue that the diplomatic approach is working -- and as long as this stands a chance, the prospects of military escalation are slim.

So what is going wrong? Despite the flurry of diplomatic activity, the military tensions are rising.  Pakistan has cancelled army leave and redeployed troops.  The Washington Post said thousands of troops were being redeployed from the Afghan border to the border with India.

Are the two countries' armies simply making sure they are prepared, just in case the diplomatic efforts fail? Or is there more going on behind-the-scenes?

Posted by Aws Qusay

I left my home in Baghdad early that day, on tenterhooks as I headed to a job interview for which I had been preparing for weeks.

It was July 2006, five months after the bombing of a revered Shi’ite shrine unleashed a wave of sectarian killing in Iraq. Only the day before, my neighbourhood in southwestern Baghdad was rocked by a huge bomb that destroyed a local mosque.

As I walked to catch the bus that morning, thoughts of the interview dropped quickly from my mind when I saw six bloodied bodies piled by the side of the street. They were men and boys, riddled with gunshot wounds. They were handcuffed and some were blindfolded. I hurried along. 

When I boarded the bus, my fellow passengers and I peered out of the windows, unable to turn away from the scores of dead bodies — revenge killings after the mosque bombing — we saw lying on the sidewalk. We were all looking for people we knew.

After my interview, I returned to find that my entire neighbourhood had been sealed off by U.S. and Iraqi troops.  I was worried sick about my family trapped within. I phoned them and pleaded with them to stay inside.

Eventually, with nowhere to go, I decided to make the trip to my grandfather’s house in western Baghdad. Under any other circumstances, it would have been too risky, since his neighbourhood was controlled by al Qaeda militants and had been the scene of massive bloodshed. But I was desperate.

When I arrived that afternoon, shaken by what I had seen and exhausted from the blistering heat, my grandfather welcomed me and sat me down to watch the World Cup soccer final — Italy versus France.

Normally, like any other Iraqi, I would have been riveted by the game. But the sight of the bodies I had seen that morning were seared in my mind.

The next morning, I sat in the garden in front of my grandfather’s home. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw several men halt a bus in broad daylight and force its
passengers onto the street.

One refused to move, and they shot him right away.

The air was thick with shouts and pleading. The gunmen, who wore no masks and couldn’t have been much older than me — I was 24 at the time — lined up all but one of the others on the pavement and executed them. One of the men killed was wearing a blue Italy soccer jersey.

It was then I understood my country was at civil war.

Thousands and thousands of Iraqis were killed in the sectarian, and indiscriminate, violence of 2006 and 2007.

Finally, U.S. and Iraqi forces managed to curtail the violence, erecting tall concrete walls around the city and deploying thousands of troops and police on the streets.

Today, my family no longer hover at home each evening, afraid to venture out. They stay out late visiting family — although they have never stopped looking over their shoulders.

A few weeks ago, I attended Iraq’s first full-capacity soccer match since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Jubilant fans packed the 50,000-seat al-Shaab stadium in central Baghdad for the national football league final.

 ”Sunnis and Shi’ites! We are all brothers!” the ecstatic crowd chanted. I stood watching the cheering crowd, waving Iraqi flags.

 The home team lost the match, but it didn’t matter. It was a victory for all of us.

At the security checkpoint on the way in to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s chancellery building, two small posters are displayed.    

“Stop Russia,” says the first. The second is a quotation from British World War Two leader Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never give up.”

Together, they sum up a national mood of grim defiance in Georgia after a short, disastrous war with Russia, followed by the loss of two provinces that have been outside Tbilisi’s control since the early 1990s but have now cemented their split by getting Moscow to recognise them as independent states under its protection.

Sitting in front of a row of Georgian and European Union  flags,  Saakashvili projects remarkable energy for a man under intense strain, three weeks into a national crisis. ”The first couple of days he didn’t sleep, we were all worried about him,” says a staffer in the presidential building. 

For several nights this week he held late-night sessions with Western reporters, sometimes finishing as late as 3 a.m., as he sought to gain the upper hand in the media war that has run parallel to the conflict on the ground with Russia.

“Russia clearly intended this as a blatant challenge to world order. It’s now up to all of us to roll Russian aggression back,” he told Reuters in an interview that started at 20 minutes after midnight.

Saakashvili has lost weight, says a Western observer who knows him well, but his face shows barely a trace of the sleepless nights.  

He seems energised by a loud chorus of Western support for Georgia after Russia’s recognition of breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia – a contrast with the start of the conflict, when some Western officials privately suggested his own hot-headedness was at least partly to blame for triggering Russia’s invasion.

Is Saakashvili’s leadership secure? For now, at least, the mood of national solidarity should make him immune to any domestic political challenge, analysts say. 

Longer-term, the prospects are less certain. Saakashvili is pinning his hopes on Georgian entry to NATO, which would commit the alliance to come to its defence if it were attacked. But many analysts believe NATO, after this crisis, is not ready to make that promise and risk being drawn into its own war with Russia.

The opposition has in effect called a moratorium on criticising the leadership. ”But the time will come when the Georgian society will start to ask them questions about what has happened to our country,” said an opposition leader, Tina Khidasheli.

Privately some Georgians blame Saakashvili for leading them into their current debacle, and the public mood is subdued and tired. ”Everyone is depressed, no one feels like working,” says a young man, Alex. A dancer at Tbilisi’s Nabadi folk theatre, Tako Svanidze, says no one is turning up to performances: ”No one has time for singing and dancing…People aren’t in the mood.” 

On Thursday Georgians
flocked to their Orthodox churches to pray for the country on a major religious festival, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.      

 ”We believe the mother of Christ will save the whole of Georgia,” said Nino Dzigua, a young woman in an orange headscarf. 

Did she think that Western support could rescue the country? 

“Only God,” she replied. 

Tension is mounting around the Black Sea following Russia’s recognition of two Georgian regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as independent states.  

Russia said its navy was monitoring ”the build-up of NATO forces in the Black Sea area” as the U.S. Navy shipped humanitarian supplies to Georgia on Wednesday.

In a move that could further aggravate Russia, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said he wanted to discuss charging Russia more for the lease of a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, which is part of Ukraine.   

Ukrainian leaders say they fear they might be next on Russia’s hit list, a concern echoed by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. He told France’s Europe 1 radio: ”I repeat that it is very dangerous, and there are other objectives that one can suppose are objectives for Russia, in particular the Crimea, Ukraine and Moldova.”

Analysts say the Crimea region, in southern Ukraine, could be used by Russia to destabilise Ukraine. Not only does it host Russia’s Black Sea fleet, but the majority of people living there are ethnic Russians.                                                            

It would not be the first time Crimea has been at the heart of a war. The territory has been conquered many times and has been controlled by people including Goths, Huns, Bulgars and Greeks. 

The Russian Empire lost the Crimean War of 1854-1856 against an alliance of France, Britain, the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire but the war is regarded by many Russians as a glorious defeat.

Crimea was again the scene of heavy fighting during World War Two, when it was occupied by Nazi Germany and Sevastopol was under siege from October 1941 until it succumbed in July 1942. Its resistance is regarded by many Russians as a heroic struggle against the odds.

Eighteenth-century Empress Catherine the Great built the neo-classical port at Sevastopol to house the Russian Navy after taking decades to conquer the Crimean region. The pride and joy of the Russian military, the region was granted to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954. After the Soviet Union fell, Moscow was forced to lease the harbour space under a deal that expires in 2017. 

Could this region — a popular holiday destination because of its green mountains, deep-blue sea and sunny climate — really be at the heart of a new war as Ukraine seeks membership of NATO and the European Union?

Ukrainian politicians say Russia’s actions in Georgia are unacceptable and they fear the worst. ”What has happened is a threat to everyone, not just for one country. Any nation could be next, any country. When we allow someone to ignore the fundamental right of territorial integrity, we put into doubt the existence of any country,” Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said on Wednesday.  

Moscow says Ukrainian politicians are trying to antagonise Moscow. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin accused Kiev on Wednesday of stirring tensions and hinted that some politicians wanted to trigger a tough response from Moscow to boost their own standing. ”This is a cynical and dangerous game,” he said.  

Political analysts acknowledge tensions are running high but say there is good cause to hope conflict can be avoided. ”There is a reason to be wary in the short-term future, there is a threat in that Ukraine is similar to Georgia in terms of what has happened in recent years,” said one analyst, Oleksander Dergachev. ”But I find it difficult to think that the threat posed is a military one. Russia relies on the fact that it has more of an influence over Ukraine economically.”
       

The people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia were celebrating on Tuesday after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree recognising the independence of the two regions. 

Western leaders responded with harsh words. U.S. President George W. Bush said it increased world tensions and Britain called for “the widest possible coalition against Russian aggression in Georgia,” where the two regions lie. 

But what can the West do to punish Russia or discourage it from any similar acts in the future? 

Military action has never been a realistic option since Russia sent tanks and troops to halt Georgia’s assault on South Ossetia. United Nations sanctions are also out of the question because Russia ihas the right of veto on the U.N. Security Council.

Major powers are also reluctant to do anything that might encourage Moscow to withdraw its help with U.N. sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme and transit support for NATO forces in Afghanistan. 

Retaliation could involve Russian membership of the big international clubs: excluding Russia from the Group of Eight (G8) top industrial democracies or blocking its bid to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). 

But any action will be carried out with the nagging thought at the back of Western leaders’ minds - Moscow is no longer the economic basket-case of Soviet times and, riding a tide of petrodollars from soaring oil prices, western Europe depends on Russian oil and gas.

Russian leaders have signalled they are not troubled by the Western reaction, partly because the Kremlin sees strong public support at home for its actions in Georgia and in the stand-off with the West, and partly because of the wealth it now has from its natural resources.

When NATO suspended activities with Russia, Moscow responded with a shrug of the shoulders, saying it was also freezing activities with the defence alliance. Moscow also plans to halt visits by senior NATO officials and joint military exercises with the alliance.

The European Union could, in theory, send in peacekeepers or break off talks with Russia over a wide-ranging strategic partnership, or even announce economic sanctions such as curbing existing trade arrangements. Moscow has shown no sign of concern over this - such moves would risk Moscow cutting energy supplies to Europe.

“Nothing scares us, including the prospect of a Cold War, but we don’t want it,” Medvedev said on Monday. “In this situation, everything depends on the position of our partners.”            

Does Russia have the upper hand? Perhaps. But despite the talk about a Cold War, there are also reasons to believe it is not about to start and that conflict can be contained.

Moscow’s confidence and strength rests largely on high prices for energy and other natural resources and it is still a far cry from the military force it was in Soviet times. Moscow also no longer controls large swathes of eastern and central Europe and no longer has the huge influence it once enjoyed in other parts of the world. The Kremlin is also likely to be concerned about investment flows into Russia, which ratings agency Fitch says could be affected by the rising tensions. 

Mikhail Kasyanov, a former Russian prime minister turned Kremlin opponent, was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying Moscow’s decision was “one more step towards the self-isolation of the Russian Federation from the international community.”

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov believes isolation is not looming for Russia: ”I don’t believe this should really be a doomsday scenario. I believe common sense should prevail.” 

Did Italy unwittingly trigger the crisis in South Ossetia and then play a central role in stopping it? It may not be the view in most of the world but you could come to that conclusion from reading some Italian papers.

First, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was quoted in a report by French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy on Wednesday, which was reproduced in full on the front page and pages 2 and 3 of Corriere della Sera, as saying that he was first alerted to the situation in South Ossetia by reports in the Italian press that he saw while on a dieting holiday in Italy.

“I am in Italy, for a slimming cure, and I am about to leave for Beijing. Then, in the Italian papers, I read: ‘Preparations for war in Georgia.’ You understand? There I am, relaxing, in Italy, and I read that my country is preparing for war! Realising something is wrong, I quickly return to Tbilisi,” Saakashvili told his French interviewer.

Besides the intriguing idea of anyone trying to lose weight in Italy, the piece suggests the Italian press had a central role in the Georgian president’s decision to try to retake the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

According to another Italian media outlook, the weekly magazine Tempi (on their website only, since the print version has been suspended for summer holidays), Italy also played a central role in stopping the five-day conflict that it may have contributed to starting.

Tempi quoted Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as saying that it was he who persuaded Vladimir Putin not to let his tanks go all the way to Tbilisi, thus avoiding what Berlusconi said would have been a “useless bloodbath”.

When Reuters took the precaution of checking the quotes with Berlusconi’s press office, we were first told: “If that’s what they write, go ahead and pick it up.” We also passed on the quotes to Moscow to get a response from Putin’s office, to clarify whether Berlusconi really has such influence on the Russian premier and former president.

Very soon, Berlusconi’s office told us it was putting out a statement to deny the juiciest quotes in the Tempi interview, where Berlusconi was quoted as saying: “Thank God my friend Putin listened to me. Otherwise there is no bloody way the Russian tanks would have stopped 15 km from Tbilisi. We have avoided a useless bloodbath.”

The quote seemed to echo Berlusconi’s election jingle “Meno male che Silvio c’e” (”thank goodness for Silvio”). But it was too good to be true, according to his press office at Palazzo Chigi. They said these quotes were not legitimate, were not the kind of language Berlusconi would have used anyway, and were the fruit of a misunderstanding at best, at worst pure invention.

The Italian prime minister, now in his third term in power, does have the ear of the Russian leader, who was the first foreign leader to visit him after the Italian conservative leader’s election victory in April, at his villa in Sardinia (see picture). The newspaper owned by Berlusconi’s brother, Il Giornale, reported on Aug. 12 — the day Russia ordered a halt to the fighting — that the Italian leader was mediating and “exercising moral-suasion” on Putin. The same paper later quoted Berlusconi as saying: “Putin told me ‘Talk to Bush’. And Bush told me ‘Talk to Putin’. In the end we achieved a major result.”

A poster at the entrance to the World War One exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum depicts the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, minutes before they were shot dead as they toured the streets of Sarajevo in an open topped car. The two bullets triggered World War One. Alliances quickly came into play and an argument between Austria and Serbia drew in Russia, Germany, France, Belgium and Britain.

Europe was at war.

On August 8 this year Russia sent its forces into Georgia to repel Tbilisi’s attempt to wrest control of the pro-Russian, breakaway region South Ossetia. Georgia, like Ukraine, has been pressing to join NATO but has only been promised membership of the alliance at an unspecified future date. What would have happened if Georgia had already secured NATO membership, as it wished, at the alliance’s meeting in Bucharest back in April?

Would the conflict have dragged in fellow NATO members including the United States, Britain and Germany? By invoking NATO’s Article V mutual defence clause, the Georgians could have required other nations to come to their assistance.

Could this have led to another European war at a time when the West’s guard was down and the Cold War years seemed consigned to history?

In the days after the conflict began, a senior envoy from a European state opposed to Georgian NATO entry told Reuters: “Thank heavens we didn’t take them in… No one in NATO wants to be dragged into a war in the Caucasus because of (President Mikheil) Saakashvili’s miscalculations.”

What do you think? 

(Posted by: Khalid al-Ansary)

The Iraqi government says it is negotiating a “time horizon” with the United States for withdrawing its troops from Iraq.

That has Iraqis like me thinking back to how the Americans got here in the first place, and whether the U.S. promises of peace and democracy after the fall of Saddam Hussein five years ago have been fulfilled.

To sum it up in a phrase: Saddam, for me, was not a good leader but what we have witnessed in the following years has not been any better.

Back in 2003, despite the bellicose rhetoric on both sides of the conflict, never in my wildest dreams did I believe U.S. soldiers would be patrolling Baghdad’s streets. We had seen plenty of war under Saddam, the unforgiving leader who ruled Iraq for nearly a quarter of a century from 1979. But Iraq had never been overrun.

Between 1980 and 1988, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed in a war with Iran over pockets of southern territory. Two years later, Saddam ordered his Republican guard to advance on Kuwait, only to see his forces humiliated by a Western-led alliance. Afterwards, he showed little mercy as he crushed an uprising across Shi’ite-dominated provinces and from the northern Kurdistan region, killing tens of thousands.

Through the bloodshed, we Iraqis came to accept that Saddam and his family would rule Iraq until its dynasty died out.

In 2003, as the drumbeat of war grew louder in the West, Saddam assured us that our military would resist attack. At the time, I was confused about Saddam’s bravado. Did he
think we would get away with defying the United States? Did he think we could really win a war if one occurred?

Despite my skepticism an invasion would ever happen, we took precautions. The women in my family took refuge at my grandfather’s house in northern Baghdad and my brothers and I hunkered down to defend our home against any looters.

Even as ground forces drew closer, Iraq’s Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf assured residents in news conferences that Iraq was giving the Americans a thumping. We had heard rumours that Baghdad’s international airport had been taken by U.S. troops, but Sahhaf insisted that Iraq had regained control of the airport. In fact, it was a bloody battle but U.S. troops ultimately prevailed.

Afterwards, black market videos sold in a Baghdad market showed Iraqi soldiers during the airport battle slitting the throats of wounded U.S. soldiers.

The city fell to U.S. forces on April 9th. A friend who lives in western Baghdad told me about the ferocious battles there between U.S. soldiers and Saddam’s Fedayeen fighters.

By the time U.S. tanks reached my neighbourhood, people were rushing into the streets to cheer them. I needed to see it with my own eyes. I ran out of my house dressed in my pajamas. When I saw U.S. soldiers’ helmets peeking out of the top of the tanks passing by, I was overwhelmed with a mix of elation and despair.

What did this mean for my country? Would it bring the democracy and prosperity promised by the United States? Or would it be a new stage in Iraq’s long oppression?

(Khalid al-Ansary is an Iraqi reporter in the Reuters Baghdad bureau)