Gunmen shot and killed U.S. Border Patrol agent Robert Rosas in California near the U.S.-Mexico border fence on July 23, the first such fatal shooting in more than a decade. In rugged desert where people smugglers and drug traffickers roam, Rosas was tracking a suspicious group of people near the rural town of Campo, about 60 miles (97 kms) east of San Diego.

After radioing for backup, he got out of his vehicle and started to follow members of the group as it split up. He was attacked, robbed of his weapon and shot several times in the head and abdomen.

Mexican police have rounded up five suspects believed to be coyotes, or people smugglers, and drug gang members, although the FBI, which is heading the investigation, considers the case unsolved.

While it unfolds, the probe into the murder of 30 year-old Rosas, father of two small children and whose memorial service is on Friday, is a test for U.S.-Mexican cooperation. Both countries are at pains to show a unified alliance in the drug war, underscored again by U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s visit to Mexico this week.

But Rosas’ murder is also a warning that Mexican organized crime is increasingly undaunted by U.S. law enforcement. In Mexico, well-armed drug cartels take on the army at will. Mexico’s escalating drug war has killed some 12,800 people since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched his army-backed crackdown on cartels.

Attacks are also rising against the Border Patrol on the U.S.-Mexico border as drug gangs, pressured by increased enforcement and the border fence, link up with people smugglers to use illegal immigrants to smuggle narcotics across the border.

Border Patrol agents often work alone in remote stretches of the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border and traffickers are willing to use brutal violence against them if threatened. Last year, Border Patrol agent Luis Aguilar was intentionally run over and killed by a smuggler in a drug-packed Hummer in Arizona.

According to U.S. security consultancy Stratfor: “such deaths in the United States can be considered almost inevitable, especially considering that authorities report nearly 50 Border Patrol agents were fired on during 2008.”  In Tucson sector alone in the first 10 months of fiscal 2009 there have been 171 assaults on Border Patrol agents.

Disarming Mexican drug cartels, who have easy access to assault weapons in gun shops in U.S. border states, is one of the central strategies of the drug war but one that is making limited progress.

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?

Now here's an interesting question. The New York Times reports that President-elect Barack Obama wants to make "a major foreign policy speech from an Islamic capital during his first 100 days in office." But from which one? As NYT staffer Helene Cooper explains, it's a question that's fraught with diplomatic, religious and personal complications. After a day of calling around Washington, she found a consensus:

It’s got to be Cairo. Egypt is perfect. It’s certainly Muslim enough, populous enough and relevant enough. It’s an American ally, but there are enough tensions in the relationship that the choice will feel bold. The country has plenty of democracy problems, so Mr. Obama can speak directly to the need for a better democratic model there. It has got the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organization that has been embraced by a wide spectrum of the Islamic world, including the disenfranchised and the disaffected.

(Photo: Obama image in Jakarta, 25 Oct 2008/Dadang Tri)

That's a diplomatic answer, the kind you'd expect to get inside the Washington Beltway. Let's look at this more from the point of view of religion. If the American president gives a major speech in a Muslim country, it will be seen as an indirect comment on the type of mosque-state relations found in that country. It's not for him as a non-Muslim to endorse a certain type of Islam over another, say Sunni over Shi'ite. But as a politician from a country where church-state relations are a lively issue, one could expect him to ask what message his choice will send concerning the political relationship with religion in the state he chooses.

There is no obvious answer. There are Muslim states with close or distant links to violence in the name of religion, which should rule them out from the start. There are Muslim states that do not respect full equality for women, religious minorities and other groups -- that's a strike against them. Others Muslim states seem stuck in a time warp, or are politically unacceptable because they are not even barely democratic. This is where the diplomats start to see some daylight. But there is also overlapping among these groups, so no model candidate emerges. The world is a complicated place, an insight that should now return to U.S. foreign policy after eight years of denying this reality.

Seen that way, the diplomats Cooper consulted seem too cautious. While there is no ideal candidate, two Muslim countries seem to represent more of what Obama might want to see than Egypt -- Indonesia and Turkey. On Indonesia, Cooper writes "the very fact that Mr. Obama once lived and went to school there would make choosing it seem like cheating." Says who? It's the most populous Muslim nation in the world and it has an Islamist problem that it is fighting better than many others.

Cooper also rules out Turkey because a Turkish diplomat told her his country had no problem with its Islamic identity but it had a secular system. Turkey's certainly not perfect, but isn't it trying more than many other Muslim countries to harmonise its faith, its past and its future in a globalised world?

(Photo: Saudi women pose with Obama cutout in Jeddah, 6 Nov 2008/Susan Baaghil)

So those are my picks. Where do you think Obama should deliver this speech?

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.

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.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent a clear “I told you so!” to the United States and Britain at the weekend, criticising them in unusually frank terms for resisting measures that might have contained the current financial crisis. The conservative leader of Europe’s largest economy reminded her partners that she had pushed for steps to boost the transparency of hedge funds during Germany’s presidency of the Group of Eight last year. ”We got things moving, but we didn’t get enough support, especially in the United States and Britain,” she told the Muenchner Merkur newspaper. Merkel expanded on her point in a speech in Austria, suggesting that both Washington and London were only now coming around to her view.

“It was said for a long time ‘Let the markets take care of themselves’ and that there is ‘no need for more transparency’…Today we are a step further because even America and Britain are saying ‘Yes, we need more transparency, we need better standards for the ratings agencies’.

Germany had made greater transparency a key theme of its rotating presidency of the G8, which includes the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia. Berlin had expressed fears that hedge funds could threaten the stability of the financial system through their heavy reliance on borrowing to finance risky trading strategies. But it ran into resistance from the United States and Britain, achieving little.

Whether Merkel’s G8 initiative could have averted or limited the current financial market crisis if it had been successful is certainly debatable. But reminding voters that she had sought to address the problem as early as last year could help Merkel score points on the domestic front ahead of a general election next year. Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) rule in an uneasy grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), and both sides have been trying to play up their own role as crisis manager in the current financial market turmoil.

Both Merkel and her SPD finance minister, Peer Steinbrueck, have tried to take credit for Germany’s efforts last year to agree better transparency rules for financial markets. SPD budget expert Carsten Schneider praised Steinbrueck’s efforts during Germany’s G8 presidency in a newspaper interview on Monday, adding: “At the time, the United States and Britain demonised every effort to agree more transparency and rules.”

As Germany’s election approaches, the “I told you so!” Berlin seemed to send to Washington and London on the weekend could turn into an “I told you so first!”-competition between Merkel’s CDU and her SPD rivals.

Once called the “mad dog of the Middle East” by President Ronald Reagan, Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi will meet U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week.

Senior State Department official David Welch told reporters he had met Gaddafi — “a person of personality and experience” — several times. 

“We don’t refer to Colonel Gaddafi in those terms today,” said Welch when asked about Reagan’s derogatory reference. 

He anticipated Rice, America’s most senior diplomat, was “quite capable” of meeting with Gaddafi and looking after U.S. interests. 

“She is anticipating this one with great interest,” he said of the upcoming Tripoli encounter. 

No word on whether the meeting — the first between Libya and a U.S. secretary of state since 1953 — will take place in one of Gaddafi’s tents.

 Is the United States going soft on Iran?

 In the past President George W. Bush accused Tehran of belonging to an “axis of evil”, compared negotiations with its president to appeasing Adolf Hitler, and warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would lead to World War Three.

His administration refused to join international talks on Iran’s nuclear programme, which it suspects could be used to produce a nuclear bomb, unless Tehran halted enriching uranium. It pointedly declined to rule out military action if a diplomatic solution was not found.

Now, the United States is sending one of its top diplomats – along with representatives from other major powers — to talks in Geneva on Saturday with Iran to hear its response to an offer of financial and diplomatic incentives if Iran gives up its sensitive nuclear work.

And Britain’s Guardian newspaper says Washington will announce in the next month that it plans to establish a diplomatic present in Tehran for the first time in 30 years — a move the newspaper describes as a “remarkable turnaround in policy by President George Bush”.

U.S. officials say the decision to send senior diplomat William Burns to the Geneva talks sends a strong signal that the United States is committed to diplomacy, adding that Washington will only join full-blown negotiations if uranium enrichment stops.

 One hawkish former U.S. administration official sees it differently. “This is, and the evidence is plain for all to see, the total intellectual collapse of the Bush administration,” former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Reuters. 

He wrote in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “There was a time when the Bush administration might itself have seriously considered using force, but all public signs are that such a moment has passed.”

He urges Washington to consider what cooperation it “will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran” but he doesn’t seem to think the U.S. administration is listening.

So is Washington preparing for a deal instead of war?

This might explain a flurry of regional diplomacy.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki heads for Turkey, shortly after meetings in Ankara by President George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley.
Burns will attend the Geneva meeting and then there’s the Guardian report.

Any deal has a logic that could benefit both sides. Analysts often point out overlapping regional interests. The two countries, say analysts, ultimately want a stable Iraq, share a loathing for the radical Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and (despite Iran’s recent buddying up) are equally distrustful of Russia. (It’s no accident that Iran under the shah was Washington’s closest Middle East ally — bar Israel.)

And yet — there always seems to one of those — the wheels of this happy bandwagon could come off, and quickly.

Much hinges on what happens in Geneva when Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili sits down for talks with the European Union’s Javier Solana, the representative of world powers in Saturday’s Geneva talks. Solana will want to see signs that Iran is ready to consider suspending uranium enrichment, a process Tehran has so far refused to halt.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose opinion ultimately holds sway in Iran, spoke on Wednesday of Iran’s “red lines” — not a very promising statement on the face of it.

Overlapping interests, say analysts, may not be enough for Iran to rehabilitate ties with the “Great Satan”. Interests have overlapped for the past 30 years or so but the hostility has continued. (President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has, however, said Iran would consider any overture to open an interests section).

And then, say some Western diplomats, there’s Israel. Will it take matters into its own hands after vowing not to let Iran get The Bomb? Diplomats say it might.

So there may be a shift in Washington. Some at least have detected it. Inside Iran, there has been an unusually public debate on how to handle the nuclear file even if there have also been some fairly uncompromising comments.

But are we really close to a breakthrough? And how long is Israel ready to wait? There’s still plenty to debate.

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.”
 
   

In the late 1990s, not long after pro-reform politician Mohammad Khatami swept to a landslide victory in the Iranian presidential elections, some Western observers started wondering if this was the step that would herald a collapse of the Islamic Republic — rather like the Soviet Union tumbled on Mikhail Gorbachev’s watch a decade earlier.

It was early days for me observing Iran. But an acquaintance of mine offered some analysis. Iran is not communist Europe. It is still a young revolution, he told me (at a time when it was
turning 20). There are still plenty of Iranians willing to die for the cause. Don’t expect it to come crashing down, he said.

It turns out he was right. After Khatami’s two terms, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected to office in 2005. It is hard to think of a man more dedicated to Iran’s revolutionary cause. To be fair, it may have been his extravagant economic promises that played a bigger part in winning him the vote than his ideological credentials. But whatever the reason for swinging the election in his favour, the result is very much with us.

Why does this matter now? Well, there are people apparently working to try and drive the Islamic Republic into oblivion. According to Seymour Hersh writing in the New Yorker, those in the White House are at the top of the list.

So the question is: does what my acquaintance told me in the late 1990s hold true 10 years later? In a country where opinion polls are notoriously inaccurate — or simply don’t exist — judging popular opinion is a mug’s game. But an anecdote may give at least one aspect of the story.

Farhad Rahimi, in his 30s, is a member of the voluntary Basij militia. Speaking at a time when double-digit inflation was biting into his taxi driver’s salary, he was still a fervent supporter of Ahmadinejad’s policy of sharing out Iran’s oil wealth more fairly. He could list a few of what he said were the president’s mistakes.

But he’d seen transformations in villages, he told me, even if he and others in Tehran were seeing few of the benefits. He still lives with his mum and dad because he can’t afford a home of his own. Rahimi was not preaching to me. He was speaking calmly and cogently — and surprisingly openly — to a Western reporter.

The Basijis, like Rahimi, see themselves as the bastions of revolutionary values, the true loyalists. If young women’s Islamic veils are not properly covering their hair, a Basij
patrol may confront her. When Bam earthquake struck in 2003, Basijis were on the frontline digging out survivors — or, sadly, mostly corpses. Analysts say core Basij activists may number a million but some say total membership could be 12 million or more. That’s a lot of people voluntarily signing up in a country of 70 million or so.

Journalists are fond of anecdotes. All too many of them involve taxi drivers. Such vignettes never give the full picture. But colourful detail combined with the broader figures surely give pause for thought and, at least, are factors for careful discussion on where Iran is heading. I’m going to ask my acquaintance for his view.