-Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent in Iraq.-

This month we reported that the number of civilians dying violent deaths in Iraq had hit a fresh low since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion -- about 125 for September.

Sounds like a lot, but for a country that only two years ago was seeing dozens of bodies pile up in the streets each day from tit-for-tat sectarian killing, it was definitely progress.

And as I prepare to end my assignment in Iraq this week, I need no argument from numbers to convince me that things are better here than when I arrived in Feb. 2008.

During my first few months, militants loyal to to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were raising hell in Baghdad, firing mortars and rockets at the Green Zone almost every hour. We could hear or feel them thud on impact, especially when they fell short, on our side of the Tigris.

A rocket hit the BBC building opposite us, causing a blast loud enough to shake our windows, although thankfully no one at the BBC was hurt by the strike.

U.S. airstrikes on Baghdad's Sadr City slum were killing many civilians. Roadside and car bombs were erupting all over the place and the streets were largely deserted after dark.

Eighteen months on and things are hardly back to normal but, as any Iraqi will tell you, Iraq feels safer than it was.

Security forces have been purged of Shi'ite militiamen and are doing a better job of stopping suicide bombings, enabling U.S. combat forces to largely pull out of Iraq's cities in June.

We rarely hear explosions in Baghdad. A semblance of law and order seems to be taking shape.
Reporting from Iraq, as a Westerner or an Iraqi, has been a tough business for some time. For Westerners, apart from the fact that few foreign correspondents here speak passable Arabic, the big headache remains security.

Ever since insurgents started kidnapping Westerners and beheading them in 2004, the foreign press corps here have been living in a kind of semi-incarceration, behind rows of concrete blast walls that make you feel a bit like a lab rat in a maze.

It varies from media organisation to the next, but all of us are pretty restricted in our movements.
We generally keep a low profile, moving around Baghdad in low key armoured cars. We don't wander the streets for long periods of time or frequent bars and nightclubs after work.

The assumption is that any Westerner is a prime target for kidnappers -- for political reasons or for a juicy ransom.

And this is not to say there are no dangers to Iraqi media workers. More than 130 have died in violence since the beginning of the war.

Seven of our colleagues from Reuters have been killed in that time, most of them Iraqis.

Security restrictions have left us heavily dependent on dedicated local journalists who can visit places we cannot and help us cobble together stories we send to the wire.

That's perhaps as it should be in a global news agency with strong local talent, but it's hard not to miss roaming the streets as I would in almost any other country.

As a military correspondent, embedding with U.S. troops has been an experience, though it can hard to get the full picture that way -- for instance, persuading a nervous bystander in the street to talk to you when you're surrounded by heavily-armed American soldiers has proved a real challenge.

As security improves, our leash has been lengthened. I've been able to travel to places with that were once off-limits, like many parts of northern Iraq.

Will it continue getting better? No one can claim to know the answer to that question. Many Iraqis are pessimistic, as well they might be after decades of war, dictatorship, brutal sanctions and sectarian bloodshed. But since Iraq was pulled back from the brink in 2007, it has defied gloomy predictions.

But I'm reminded of comments by the head of the Red Cross Iraq delegation Juan-Pedro Schaerer about avoiding the temptation to write off Iraq's persistent violence as "normal".

This week, one of our journalists, Ahmed, was awoken in the middle of the night by loud gunshots.

Gunmen had stormed the house of his neighbour and family doctor, and shot him in the head. Ahmed took him to hospital, where he remains in critical condition. He may never walk or talk again.
Clearly, that feeling of nearly normality is fragile.

Related blog: A voice in the wilderness?

By John Aloysius Farrell — the views expressed are his own. This article first appeared on GlobalPost.

The death of Sen. Edward Kennedy will cost the United States not just a passionate voice for economic and racial justice, but also its irreplaceable champion of a liberal, less belligerent, humanistic foreign policy.

Step back to Friday, October 11, 2002, when only 23 U.S. senators voted against the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq.

The anger and fear spurred by the 9/11 attacks was too raw, and Democrats named Clinton, Kerry, Biden and Edwards, nursing ambition, dared not look “soft” on terrorism. Election Day was just weeks away. The two Democratic leaders — Sen. Tom Daschle and Rep. Dick Gephardt — gave Bush the green light for war. Kennedy’s pal, Sen. Chris Dodd, voted “yes.” Even Rep. Patrick Kennedy, the Democrat from Rhode Island, voted for war.

But not Patrick’s dad. Not Ted.

In what seemed, at the time, a quixotic performance, Ted Kennedy returned to the Senate floor time and again, warning Americans and his fellow senators of the catastrophe ahead. His prestige gave cover to other Democrats, and the number of “no” votes doubled, then tripled.

“Just one year into the campaign against Al Qaeda, the administration is shifting focus, resources and energy to Iraq,” Kennedy warned. “The change in priority is coming before we have fully eliminated the threat from Al Qaeda … Even with the Taliban out of power, Afghanistan remains fragile.”

In the end, Kennedy still got creamed that day — 77 to 23. But a few years later, when asked what vote made him the proudest, in all those thousands of roll calls in almost five decades of service in the Senate, he pointed to his vote against the Iraq war.

And that is what I, you, we, the world will miss: the big guy with mighty shoulders and international stature, willing to shout “No!” when the drums of war are being pounded by the cons and neo-cons, the neo-libs and triangulators, the chicken hawks and profiteers.

“It is possible to love America while concluding that it is not now wise to go to war,” Kennedy said in 2002. What American politician will have the guts to say something like that, at a pivotal moment in US history, after Ted joins Jack and Bob beneath the grassy slope at Arlington?

Sure, the guy was no saint. Great politicians, in my experience, rarely are. Kennedy’s personal failures have been amply catalogued.  And the same senator who could rail against the military arms industry did pretty well over the years, using his roster of behind-the-scenes tricks to add fighter planes and advanced research funds to the Pentagon budget in order to protect jobs and promote industry in Massachusetts.

Nor can we forget how the Kennedy family legacy mixed such gems as the “missile gap” and the Bay of Pigs debacle with genuine accomplishments like the nuclear test ban treaty, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Alliance for Progress. Or how Jack Kennedy’s inaugural vow to “pay any price, bear any burden” led us into the bloody swamps of Vietnam.

It was the Vietnam War, and Lyndon Johnson’s relentlessly ineffective prosecution of that war, that split the Democratic Party, shattered the liberal consensus, and gave Ted Kennedy his voice.

Kennedy’s initial venture into foreign affairs occurred in 1965, when he helped steer a historic immigration reform bill through the Senate; it was an issue he would stick with, and a cause he would champion, for more than 40  years.  As Kennedy’s biographer, Adam Clymer, relates in “Edward M. Kennedy, A Biography,” he used that same Judiciary Committee perch, with its oversight of American refugee policy, to hold hearings and fact-finding missions about Vietnam.

In 1966 and 1967, Ted and his brother Robert began to split with Johnson over the war. After losing a second brother to assassination in 1968, Ted picked up the fallen colors. He quickly became a leader of the New Left — in both domestic policy and foreign affairs. It was a job he never relinquished.

In the Senate, Kennedy fought Richard Nixon’s Vietnam and nuclear weapon policies and vexed the White House with his strong human rights stands on Biafra, Chile and Bangladesh.  He tangled with Ronald Reagan over nuclear arms, El Salvador and Nicaragua. And throughout his career, he was an outspoken critic of the British crackdown on Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Soviet government’s brutal treatment of dissidents and South Africa’s racist system of apartheid.

As Conor O’Clery, Andrew Meldrum and Pascale Bonnefoy will tell you here at GlobalPost, Ted Kennedy will be mourned in Ireland, South Africa and Chile, as well as in Massachusetts tonight.
The culmination of Kennedy’s Irish ventures came during the Clinton administration, when I happened to be covering the White House for a Boston newspaper. It was a great perch, and given my own Irish ancestry, I took an abiding interest in what was going on.

Oh it was fun. For years, Kennedy and a few other Irish-American politicians — Tip O’Neill, Pat Moynihan, Hugh Carey — had resisted the sentimental blarney, rampant among their constituents, that glorified the violent acts of the hard men of the Irish Republican Army.  Then their friend John Hume called from Derry with a message: the IRA might be ready to deal.

And suddenly there was Teddy, mischievous and grinning and determined as hell, employing his skillful staff, exploiting his contacts with former Kennedy staffers at the White House, and mightily pissing off the English, the British desk at State, and some of Bill Clinton’s own advisers by suggesting that a visa be granted, and a hand extended, to Gerry Adams and his Sinn Fein brothers-in-arms and their Protestant counterparts on the other side of the divide.

Teddy had Bill’s back, and Clinton responded with nerve and verve and insight. George Mitchell earned his own brand of sainthood negotiating the Good Friday peacemaking agreement. And, typically, Teddy cashed in by getting his sister, Jean Smith, appointed as U.S. ambassador to Ireland. Honey Fitz and PJ would be proud.

I will miss the big guy. There are few in American politics who loved the game, and played it so well, for so many years — who did so much for so many, despite the inevitable tragedies. Kennedy joins an elite handful — Clay, Webster, Calhoun and the like – who never made it to the White House, but define the word “senator” in American history.

Yeah, I will miss him. But I fear we all will miss him, in the pitch of a crisis, when our baser instincts come to the fore, and we need that bellowing independent voice, reminding us what America means. And I’m hoping tonight that, like John Steinbeck’s ghost of Tom Joad, Ted Kennedy will never leave us:

“Well maybe … a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one … Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there … I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ — I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folk eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build — why, I’ll be there.”

More from GlobalPost:

Kennedy’s death: Ireland mourns a “true friend”

Ted Kennedy, anti-apartheid crusader

Analysis: Lessons of Europe’s history with terrorism

Thomas Mucha is the managing editor in charge of correspondents for GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. The views expressed are his own. –

It’s been a fascinating few weeks for global news — the real kind, of course — but also for the fake stuff.

I’m referring to “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” which sent correspondents and producers to locales where comedy shows don’t normally operate: Iran and Iraq. Along the way, these two Comedy Central commercial properties cooked up plenty of laughs. But they also produced some insightful — and certainly entertaining — coverage of these two complex and important global stories.

If Wolf Blitzer isn’t quaking in his beard, he should be.

These foreign forays produced powerful storytelling that illustrates how intelligence and humor, when mixed with a little ground truth, can add depth to very serious matters. It also demonstrates how fake news is, indisputably, a power on the global media stage. As an added bonus it was yet another funny and scathing attack on the pompous earnestness that typifies much of the mainstream media: You know you’re in trouble if you can be so brutally, and effortlessly, parodied.

Let’s start with Iran, where The Daily Show began with a simple idea, but then got much more than it was expecting.

To cover the country’s presidential election, Daily Show host and executive producer Jon Stewart sent “senior foreign correspondent” Jason Jones and producer Tim Greenberg to Tehran for two weeks (the trip followed Jones’ last Daily Show piece, “End Times,” which savaged the New York Times and went viral on the web).

Armed with official journalist visas granted by the Iranian government, Jones and Greenberg traveled to Tehran to tell jokes, but also to poke fun at American conceptions of Iran as “evil.”

In full parody mode, they titled their series “Behind the Veil: Minarets of Menace,” and produced an animated introduction filled with ominous Middle Eastern music, and featuring a preening and heroic Jones scampering through the desert. It’s the kind of cable TV flash-and-dash that Anderson Cooper would kill for.

Media-mocking humor is rampant throughout the reports: there’s Jones dressed as the stereotypical foreign correspondent — requisite facial stubble, khaki reporter’s vest and dark sunglasses, a Persian scarf draped roguishly around his neck.

There are bumbling interactions with the usual media suspects in Iran, including former foreign minister Ebrahim Yazdi, reformist cleric Mohammad Ali Abtahi, and Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari, to whom Jones speaks Arabic instead of Farsi.

There are also street interviews with “seething” Iranians where Jones tries, and fails, to make them say how much they hate America. On the contrary: upon learning of Jones’ Daily Show connections, one smiling and stylish young man launches into a killer impersonation of Stewart’s staccato George W. Bush. “Heh, heh, heh …. heh heh heh.”

The coup de grace comes when Jones visits a Tehran home complete with a happy and clearly prosperous couple, two bubbly kids, flat-screen TVs and a Wii gaming console. “You have a beautiful cave,” Jones says, handing the young daughter a carton of Marlboro Reds to “earn their trust.”

Yes, the joke here is on the American audience.

Iranians are normal. They wear Dolce & Gabbana and Diesel, play video games and produce rap music. They know more about American geography and history than many Americans (one elderly man ticks off U.S. presidents in reverse order — “Bush, Clinton, Bush the father, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon” — juxtaposed, naturally, with an American in Times Square who can’t answer the question, “Name a country in the Middle East that begins with I-R-A-N.”) The satire is funny. It is also devastatingly effective.

But as the events in Tehran darkened (Jones and Greenberg left Iran before the serious violence began), the tone of the coverage changed.

A later piece points out that Yazdi, Abtahi and Bahari (”the Axis of Evil’s Axis of Evil”) had been detained by authorities. The reports filled with the grainy and visceral YouTube videos culled from Andrew Sullivan or Nico Pitney’s running coverage of the uprising. And the final report leaves the humor behind altogether:

“As I watch what’s happening there now, ” Jones says, “I know that somewhere in that sea of faces are the same people I had met, people who were gracious enough to take me into their homes, and schools, and coffee shops, people who indulged my asinine questions, people I hope will be safe and not be harmed or arrested for the simple act of wearing green and wanting a voice.”

Do the millions of Americans who watched this series (or, more likely, internet video clips of it) have a better understanding of what’s happening inside Iran? Do they now have a stronger sense of daily life there? Do they now know more about the things that unite, rather than divide, the people of these two countries? And did they have fun watching it?

Mission accomplished.

The Colbert Report, which earlier this month broadcast a week of shows from Saddam Hussein’s former Al Faw Palace in Baghdad, was equally impressive in its foreign coverage — not least for pulling off the technical feat of producing five 30 minute programs from a war zone 5,200 miles from its studios in Manhattan.

So why transplant an entire comedy show into difficult, even dangerous, conditions? To correct yet another shortcoming of the mainstream media, of course: Iraq had fallen off the news map. Here’s how Colbert explained it in the June 6 edition of Newsweek, for which he was the magazine’s guest editor:

“I hadn’t seen it in the media for a while, and when I don’t see something, I assume it’s vanished forever, like in that terrifying game peekaboo. We stopped seeing much coverage of the Iraq War back in September when the economy tanked, and I just figured the insurgents were wiped out because they were heavily invested in Lehman Brothers.”

Funny, of course. But Colbert’s Baghdad caper was also smart, courageous, and culturally relevant (the media-savvy President Obama doesn’t play along with a dangerous comedian like Colbert unless there’s a political upside).

Clips of the Baghdad shows quickly flooded YouTube, Hulu, Facebook, Twitter, as well as the mainstream media (The New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Time, Newsweek and others covered it). And so, like Jones in Iran, Colbert’s mission was also accomplished.

No, this is not journalism. And neither Colbert nor his Daily Show counterparts make that claim.

But in an increasingly global media landscape where satire bleeds into analysis and where hope meets the brutality of a Basij baton, fake news is playing an increasingly important role — particularly on the internet, where hundreds of thousands of people download, watch and share these clips each day.

Love it or hate it, millions of people are paying attention to fake news across America and the world.

(Click here for the article on GlobalPost.)

(For previous columns by Thomas Mucha on GlobalPost, click here.)

(Above: U.S. General Ray Odierno, Commanding General, Multinational-Force-Iraq, prepares to give actor/comedian Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” a haircut during Colbert’s performance for U.S. military personnel at Al Faw Palace in Baghdad in this USO handout photo dated June 7, 2009.  REUTERS/Steve Manuel/USO/Handout)

-Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent based in Baghdad.-

For the U.S. military, it's the million dollar question -- or rather the $687 billion question, according to a recent estimate of the Iraq war's total cost. Is Iraq now stable enough for them to take a permanent back seat?

The short answer is no one knows. The only way they were ever going to find out was to leave Iraq's own forces to it and hope the whole thing doesn't come tumbling down. They started doing that on Tuesday when they pulled out of Iraqi cities.

It's been an encouraging start. A big bomb in Kirkuk cast a shadow over Iraq's celebrations of its new-found sovereignty, but since then things have been relatively quiet. Militants might try to take advantage by stepping up attacks, but for the moment they seem content with celebrating a "victory" over the occupation -- and setting off the odd bomb, of course.

The United States' coalition partners have for the most part long since departed. British forces handed over southern Iraq to the Americans in April, but since 2007 their 4,000 odd troops left had been largely confined to Basra airport anyway.

And one thing the crystal ball gazers have learned about Iraq's hugely complicated, many-sided conflict is that the past is rarely a reliable guide to the future.

When optimists thought Iraq was poised to enjoy democracy after the fall of Saddam, it spiralled into years of bloody insurgency and sectarian killing. Later, just when it seemed all hope was lost and Iraq would have to be partitioned, things starting getting dramatically better.

The idea that Iraqi forces aren't ready to take on the country's security usually centre on claims that they are untested, not well trained or infiltrated with militiamen.

But few deny they look more professional and integrated now than anyone would have thought possible two years ago. They might still be full of militiamen, but those militiamen are no longer kidnapping or killing political rivals, as in the past.

And there are clearly some things the Iraqis do better. For one thing, they know the language and understand the culture.

When I was on a U.S. patrol in Iraq's troubled Diyala province, a U.S. unit nearby accidentallly shot and wounded a civilian in Jalawla town, forcing them to vacate it because a public outcry would put other soldiers at risk of attack.

What they had done is fire a warning shot at a vehicle after the driver failed to heed a command -- in English -- to stay back. But few Iraqis in rural areas speak basic English.

The real test will be when U.S. pulls all combat forces out, under President Barack Obama's orders, by September next year.

Many Iraqis I've spoken too seem convinced the insurgents are just biding their time, sharpening their knives and stockpiling explosives waiting to reignite the conflict.

But whether or not Iraq can look after itself, at some point the Americans have to say: Look, we've done our best to get the lid back on Pandora's Box. Now it's over to you.

— Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own —

The U.S. armed forces, the world’s most powerful, outnumber the country’s diplomatic service and its major aid agency by a ratio of more than 180:1, vastly higher than in other Western democracies. Military giant, diplomatic dwarf?

The ratio applies to people in uniform (or pin-striped suits). In terms of money, the U.S. military towers just as tall. Roughly half of all military spending in the world is American. Even potential adversaries in a conventional war spend puny sums in comparison. The 2010 defense budget now before Congress totals $534 billion, not including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. China’s defense budget is $70 billion, Russia’s around $50 billion.

Is the huge imbalance between the size of the U.S. armed forces and the civilian agencies that make up “soft power” — chiefly the foreign service and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — destined to remain a permanent fixture in the political landscape?

The gap is not likely to shrink dramatically, despite a growing internal debate over how to balance the instruments of power. Ironically, the man who has provided some of the most memorable statistics illustrating the hard power-soft power gap is Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the only holdover from the cabinet of George W. Bush and President Barack Obama’s most inspired choice.

One of Gates’ favorite examples: The 6,600 foreign service professionals of the State Department equal the number of personnel of one (out of 11) aircraft carrier strike group.

The Pentagon spends slightly more on health care for the military than the State Department spends on looking after foreign affairs. And the United States employs more military musicians than professional diplomats.

The gap is meant to shrink, so that the United States can “renew its role as a leader in global development and diplomacy,” in the words of the White House Office of Management and Budget. It lists $53.9 billion for the Department of State and other international programs in the 2010 budget, a tenth of the defense budget.

The Obama administration wants to double foreign assistance by 2015 and “significantly” increase the size of the foreign service and USAID, the foreign assistance agency which shrank from a high of about 15,000 during the Vietnam War to just over 1,100 now.

OBAMA TURNS AWAY FROM OLD NOTIONS

Building up “soft power” is a sign that Obama is turning away from the notion that diplomacy is largely a tool to convey threats - a notion popular among the neoconservatives who drove the Bush administration’s policy - rather than to negotiate compromise and avert war instead of cleaning up the post-war ruins.

Adding people to civilian agencies that promote U.S. foreign policy interests may well be easier than adjusting the arsenal of the armed forces to the wars they are fighting now or are likely to fight in the near future.

Cutting the size of the military itself is not a subject of debate in Washington, not only because it is obvious that they are badly stretched by the two simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but also because few Americans, and even fewer American policymakers, doubt the wisdom of permanent military supremacy for the United States.

How that should be guaranteed is a perennial subject of debate, reignited this month by the defense budget Gates submitted. It calls for a 4 percent increase over the previous year, not insignificant in a country facing a $1.2 trillion deficit next year, and showed that the “military-industrial complex” the late Dwight Eisenhower warned about is alive and well.

In his presidential farewell address in 1961, General Eisenhower said the military establishment and a permanent arms industry combined to create a military-industrial complex whose “influence  –economic, political, even spiritual– is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the federal government.”

That influence is still felt, as shown by the reaction to Gates’ decision to readjust the arsenal, moving more money to the tools of irregular warfare and scrapping high-ticket items originally designed to fight a Cold War enemy who no longer exists. Case in point: the F-22 jet fighter, an aircraft pilots describe as the Ferrari of the air. It costs $140 million apiece.

The Air Force originally wanted 381 of the planes, Gates wants to halt production at 187 already built or in the pipeline. The aircraft is being built by companies in 44 states. That translates into 88 senators and ensures broad political support in Congress as well as vivid complaints over job losses once production ends.

Before betting on the outcome of the congressional fight over big-ticket weapons systems, keep in mind an old Washington adage: “The president proposes, Congress disposes.”

– Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The views expressed are his own. –

It’s no great surprise in American politics these days, but already a great partisan debate has broken out about President Obama’s foreign policy effectiveness to date. For his enthusiasts, the United States has hit the “reset” button and is reclaiming its place as not only a strong country, but a respected leader among nations. For his detractors, Obama is making the world dangerous by apologizing for America’s alleged misdeeds of the past, naively talking with dictators, and cutting the defense budget.

And as usual, the truth is neither of these polar positions. But as a past critic of Obama, especially during his days of promising a rapid and unconditional exit from Iraq during the presidential campaign, I would nonetheless argue that he has done a good job overall, and that his supporters have the stronger case to date. Still, making too much of provisionally good decisions in the first 100 days verges on playing a silly game of Potomac Jeopardy that only the evening talk shows and political junkies really care about. The bottom line is that Obama is just getting started. But he is off to a more solid start than almost any of his recent predecessors.

Consider the policy towards five key nations. And start with the wars. These are Category A problems. Obama has inherited a more difficult hand than any president since Nixon in terms of active, ongoing conflicts. Already we have lost almost as many American troops in our two wars on Obama’s watch as died in the first year of all of Obama’s predecessors going back to Carter combined.

But that is not a slight on the president, only a reminder of the difficult world that confronts him. And in dealing with these challenges, to date Obama has wisely listened to the counsel of his commanders and other experts on Iraq and Afghanistan. Our drawdown in the former place, while still rapid, will retain up to 50,000 U.S. troops even after it’s over. That is a lot of combat capability, and as such a departure from what Obama promised last year, and a relief to those of us still nervous about Iraq.

In Afghanistan, Obama will roughly double the American troop presence there in his first year in office. That will finally give commanders the wherewithal (or at least most of the wherewithal) to carry out a proper counterinsurgency strategy–with its twin goals of protecting the civilian population and building up Afghan institutions so they can increasingly do the job on their own.

The other crucial set of problems might be described as the nuclear hot spots–Iran, North Korea, Pakistan. On these, Obama’s record is less impressive to date. That is not, however, because he has done anything particularly wrong. Rather, the problems are extremely nettlesome. If Obama deserves any criticism, it is simply that his campaign rhetoric implied these would be far easier problems once George Bush was out of the White House and a new president was ensconced on Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, the main reason these problems are hard is because of who we are dealing with in each case, and not because of George Bush or any other American leader. Since Obama is the one who raised expectations, he deserves to take a bit of a hit perhaps for not quickly fulfilling them–but otherwise his hand seems rather steady on the tiller.

Indeed, President Obama’s Pakistan policy is already an improvement over Bush’s in its emphasis on more military and economic aid, the naming of a special envoy, and related efforts. These steps finally begin to recognize our stakes in this crucial part of the world. Still, to call anybody’s policy towards Pakistan a solid one at a time when that country is practically crumbling before our eyes would go too far. Again, his policy is more “incomplete” than anything else. Which is exactly what you’d expect after 100 days.

– Preston Keat is director of research at Eurasia Group, a global political risk consultancy, and author of the forthcoming book “The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investors” (with Ian Bremmer). Any views expressed are his own. For the related story, click here.

There are a number of macro risks that will continue to grab headlines in 2009, including the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, cross-border tensions and state instability in Pakistan, and Iran’s 
ongoing quest to develop advanced nuclear technologies.

These risks are real, and will not be resolved easily or quickly. But there are two other general groups of political risks that could be defining both for investors and policy makers: first, the prospect of a number of interrelated market risks in developed and emerging Europe, and second, the challenges faced by the United States regarding multilateral leadership (particularly in the area of financial regulatory reform).

Political risks have historically mattered much more in emerging markets, but political risk in the developed, industrial democracies is rising more quickly than anyone would have predicted a year ago.

Europe

Political-market risk in emerging Europe is significantly higher now than any time in the past decade. Russia and Ukraine, and even recent star “emerging Europe” performers such as Turkey, Hungary, and Romania face serious vulnerabilities in the coming 
year. In addition, western financial institutions based in countries
 like Germany, Italy and Austria are particularly vulnerable to a credit 
crisis in Eastern Europe, where they have large loan exposures. Russia’s growing anti-westernism, its state intervention in strategic
 economic sectors, and its assertive posture regarding Georgia have been widely discussed, and will remain concerns in
 2009.

This also plays into one of the most problematic country risk 
stories right now: Ukraine. Its steel-centric economy is in free
 fall due to dramatically reduced global demand, many of its companies
 have large foreign debt financing needs that they will struggle to meet, 
 and its domestic politics are gridlocked and bordering on 
dysfunctional.

Add serious ongoing tensions with Russia to the list, and 
the situation looks bad from almost every angle. The year has
 already started badly, with Gazprom cutting gas supplies 
to Ukraine, and the
 standoff highlights the growing animosity between Moscow and Kiev.

The global financial and credit crises, combined with recession in
 Western Europe, have exposed several other countries in emerging Europe 
to serious financial market risks. In Hungary, the IMF and the 
EU needed to step in with a dramatic aid package in order to head off a potential currency and bond market collapse. And in Romania, there are
 growing concerns about a real estate bubble, rapidly declining economic
 growth, and the evaporation of repatriation cash flows from Romanians 
living in Italy and Spain.

Both the Hungary and Romania stories highlight the increasing 
interconnectedness of political and market risk in the EU. The newer
 member states can no longer be considered in relative isolation from the
 core, Western European countries.

The most notable example is the 
exposure of Western banks to credit risk in Eastern Europe. In recent
 years western banks have made substantial home mortgage, consumer, and
 business loans to eastern Europeans that were denominated in western 
currencies. The borrowers were
 exposed to local currency risks that the often did not fully understand
.

Italy, 
 Austria, and Germany had the largest exposures. Now these western
 governments may need to step in to assist with the solution. In fact, if
 the EU and European Central Bank had not intervened in dramatic fashion 
in Hungary, a number of western-European banks and pension funds would
 have been in very serious trouble. The problem is that this may only be 
the beginning of a crisis that could involve dozens of countries in both 
the East and the West.

The U.S. and Multilateralism

In the past several years the dynamics of “multilateralism” have evolved 
fairly dramatically. Two central developments this year:

1.  A number of
 additional players such as India, China, and Brazil are actively
 seeking to play a larger role in multilateral negotiations and 
institutions.

2.  The U.S. is in the process of a presidential 
leadership transition, with an expectation that the new administration
 will address these issues differently than its predecessor.

This new environment presents both challenges and opportunities. A 
larger number of “key” players at the table means that policy 
coordination could be much more difficult - a classic collective action
 problem. At the same time, engaging newer, emerging-market countries may 
make sustainable “breakthrough” outcomes more plausible, as these 
countries will be central to tackling complex issues such as climate 
change and global trade.

Prior to September of 2008, the central challenges of 
multilateral cooperation were in areas such as energy/climate change, 
 trade, and security. Then the global financial and credit crisis offered 
an almost perfect experiment. How would the world’s leading 
countries, along with those who aspired to positions of greater 
leadership (e.g. China, India, Brazil) manage this systemic crisis?

When it comes to a new financial regulatory architecture, the U.S. is 
likely to find support for its agenda in the UK and China, who will
 share the its general aversion to giving meaningful regulatory authority 
to multilateral institutions such as the IMF. As long as these three key
 players can agree on general principles for market regulation, power 
will remain in the hands of national governments rather than any
 multilateral organization.

But this 
is where a key, lurking political risk comes into play - can the U.S.
 actually take the lead in developing a coherent approach to new 
regulation of capital markets?

Congress will probably feel that it needs to act in a dramatic
 fashion and enact new legislation. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve 
will also have serious, and potentially conflicting agendas. So even if
 the multilateral dimension looks manageable, the domestic and
 bureaucratic politics of new regulation present a substantial new risk.

Salim Adil is an author for Global Voices Online, a website that aggregates, curates, and translates news and views from the global blogosphere. The opinions expressed are his own and those of the bloggers he quotes.

Will this become one of those moments in history? In years to come will you recount to your grand children where you were when an Iraqi journalist, Montather Al-Zeidi, threw his shoes at the president of the United States? For me I was at home just getting my kids ready to sleep when my father called me insisting that I simply had to switch on the television immediately.

Iraqi bloggers reacted in much the same way with a number who wrote their first new post in months just to make their comment. Abbas Hawazin went as far to predict that shoe throwing will now be part of mainstream culture and has gone to look for a good-sized shoe to carry in his pocket, “in case I need to make any public expression of anger should the case arise.”

Last of Iraqis broke his once-a-week frequency to share his opinion on the incident. “In the Iraqi traditions or may I say Arabic traditions in general; it’s the maximum insult a man can do…it’s the maximum humiliation no word can accomplish”, he writes. And he gives his view of the Iraqi Street:

“Today I went to work as usual and all the people I saw were very very happy, it was like a national celebration…A female patient came to me for a filling and as we were waiting for the Anesthesia to take effect she said “do you know doc. That yesterday was an Eid to me; I haven’t celebrated Eid for the past 3 years because the Americans “accidentally” killed my husband and son and Bush is the reason why they are here so yesterday some of my revenge has been taken” …all the staff said the same thing “A statue should be built for Muntathar” in fact many of them have used the photo of Muntathar as a background for their mobiles but the really beautiful thing that made me even happier was that no one referred to his sect or anything…they were all proud of him…”

One person who does not think so is Nibras Kazimi who stood alone among Iraqi bloggers to defend George Bush:

“Personally, I got angry. Very angry. I will make a public promise: should I ever run into a certain reporter called Muntather al-Zaidi, presently of Al-Baghdadia TV, I will seriously consider beating the crap out of him… See, I will forever remain indebted to President George W. Bush. He is my hero. He liberated Iraq, and that’s how I will always see it. Had there been no President Bush, then Saddam would still be Saddam.”

Baghdad Treasure is torn between professional pride and being an Iraqi:

“As a journalist myself, I found what the reporter did was extremely wrong. Journalists have their voices and pens (and now the internet) to express whatever they want to protest against. However, I was kind of relieved. As an Iraqi citizen, I believe Bush deserved this ending that the entire world will remember and cherish. I mean what wrong the man had done was huge. His failure to prepare for an invasion aftermath caused Iraqis and Americans hundreds of thousands of souls, not to mention the destruction of an entire country, the millions who have migrated and the creation of terrorism in Iraq.”

For a longer version of this article, visit Global Voices