Tom Streithorst
Bright idea: can beauty create a more peaceful world?
Poverty, for the outsider, is often picturesque. But not here. This neighbourhood on the outskirts of Amara in southern Iraq has got to be the most hideous place I have ever seen: garbage, dirt, battered metal carcasses of “dead” cars, deep holes gouged out of the ground, dusty children wearing filthy clothes, the houses simultaneously decrepit and unfinished.
But it isn’t the poverty that is shocking, it is the ugliness. Yes, the people here are poor, but I’ve been to poorer places in Afghanistan, and in India. But even in those places at least your eye could rest somewhere and find something of beauty.
What, I wonder, would it be like to grow up here? Not in terms of the danger or the poverty—we can all pretend to imagine what that is like. But what would it be like never to see anything pretty—only brown dirt, brown houses, dirty red cloth, and dust everywhere? In the middle of a warzone, do I sound like an effete aesthete? Maybe. But there are worse things to be in the midst of a warzone.
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Jonathan Power
Obama: a new serious tone to worldwide peacemaking
It seems fashionable to argue that the wheels are coming off Barack Obama’s foreign policy. It’s a position which the distinguished American scholar Philip Bobbitt stakes out in the most recent edition of Prospect. But, in truth, nothing much is happening in foreign affairs—and even if he himself had not earned his peace price, President Obama reflects the new era of tranquility over which he presides.
Let’s look at the ledger. Iraq has all but disappeared from the front page. Afghanistan and Pakistan remain, but even here investors are still steadily upping their investments in Pakistan, presumably judging that the conflict is being over-hyped. The argument with Iran over whether it is building nuclear weapons drags on, despite the forgotten report of the CIA two years ago, which found that Iran was probably not. Iran now says it might ship some of its used uranium to Russia to be converted into fuel (to provide medical isotopes) or else import from Europe, instead of manufacturing its own. The argument should now be relatively easy to wrap up.
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David Goodhart
The Real IRA are a "minority within a minority within a minority".
Yesterday a 17-year-old was charged with the murder of Constable Stephen Carroll in County Armagh earlier this month. That incident followed the killings of two British soldiers by the Real IRA, in the wake of which I was asked by the Washington Post whether the case for a united Ireland should be reexamined. This is what I had to say:
A minority of a minority of a minority – a group of perhaps two dozen embittered extremists – kill a couple of British soldiers (the first time in 12 years) and wound two more and two Northern Irish civilians and you think it might be a good idea to concede their main, historic demand for which there is no majority support in Northern Ireland and no great enthusiasm in the Irish Republic. Read more »
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