The World Today: November 2004: November 2004

By invading, occupying, and imposing a new regime on Iraq, the United States may be following, intentionally or not, in the footsteps of former western colonial powers, and even worse, may be doing so in a region that within living memory concluded a lengthy struggle to expel just such occupiers.

Since the invasion of Iraq, American-Syrian relations have worsened dramatically; harsh Syrian rhetoric was countered by vehement American accusations of assistance to Iraqi insurgents. Washington slapped sanctions on Damascus for supporting ‘terrorism’, and even rashly allowed Israel to strike targets within Syria, after thirty years of relative calm. Has Syria properly handled unreasonable American-Israeli pressure? Or has it ultimately achieved its own isolation by alienating powerful friends with risky meddling in Lebanon?

The Beslan tragedy and its aftermath have thrown the spotlight once again on Russia’s ambivalent relationship with the Islamic world. Moscow insists that its quarrel is with international terrorism and Islamic extremism and not with Islam as a political-religious movement.

The terrorist hostage-taking at Beslan and subsequent carnage was not just an escalation of a Chechen independence struggle, it was part of a division of the conflict into two wars: a nationalist guerrilla campaign fought in the rebel province and a wider Islamist terrorist attempt to destabilise the Russian Caucasus.

It has all the hallmarks of popular fiction; a president caught up in persistent allegations of scandal, while his potential successors battle it out by fair means or foul and political ‘technologists’ try to engineer victory. A good read perhaps were it not that the country concerned – Ukraine – needs to work out where it stands in the world.

There is a real crisis of legitimacy in Nigeria. Many people believe the government does not have their interests at heart, internationally backed reforms produce a sceptical response. And now there are general strikes about petrol price increases and armed threats to what should be the nation’s lifeline – the oil of the Niger delta.