Tag Archives: Europe and the world

How anti-American are the French?

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Not as much as you might think, argues The Economist in a long, Christmas-special piece about French anti-Americanism (article freely available to non-subscribers) :

In one 2004 poll, 72% of the French had a favourable view of Americans, more even than in Britain (62%) or Spain (47%). Some 68% of those questioned in another poll the same year said that what unites France and America was more important than what separates them. During the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings in 2004, politicians were frosty, but the people at large showed an outpouring of gratitude to American veterans.

It’s true that there is a big gap between the view of the U.S. (pretty bad) and the view of the American people (quite good) in France, a sure sign that a substantial part of what is regarded as anti-Americanism is mainly driven by anti-Bushism.
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BT Contract For Huawei

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China’s Huawei Technologies, one of the world’s leading networking and telecommunications equipment suppliers (and big Cisco rival), has just announced that it has signed a contract with British Telecom for the deployment of its multi-service access network (MSAN) and Transmission equipment for the BT 21CN network. This seems to be an important step forward for Huawei.

The contract is signed today after going through a two year rigorous procurement and authentication process. This is one of the single largest procurement programs undertaken in the communications industry, to underpin BT’s GBP10 billion 21st Century Network programme over the next five years. This rigorous authentication process was used to assess Huawei’s capabilities, which included the quality of Huawei’s products and solutions, direction of Huawei’s corporate development strategy, management system, quality control system, project management capability and corporate social responsibility.

Huawei believes that the 21CN project and BT’s investment in Huawei’s innovation will spearhead the development of more new products and services for the British telecommunications industry and is of strategic importance to both UK businesses and economy. This will not only generate more new job opportunities within Huawei UK but also for our local service partners.

From Herat: a relief I didn’t know I needed…

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Just a few minutes ago I came back from the so called “Mobile Bar”, the weekly social get together of the internationals working with the different NGOs or other international organizations. And let me tell you something: You would not belief the kind of relief I felt right the minute I came to the rooms of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who hosted the event today. People, male and female, were chatting to each other, music was playing loudly, alcohol was served – if you wanted it, and the headscarves were abandoned right at the door.
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Afghanistan, how art thou

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Dusty HeratDust. It’s everywhere. On your body, in your eyes, your hands never feel clean and clean clothes never stay like that for more than an hour. At night, visibility sometimes is less than 50 meters. And during the day, the city vanishes under a cloud of beige.
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Herat, Afghanistan, 4 years after.

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Nation building in failed states can be a little tricky, as not just a few political strategists are realising these days. With respect to Iraq, the deadly result of their misconceptions can be watched on the hour every hour. This, on the other hand, has, for better or worse, reduced the world’s attention devoted to Afghanistan, the other major construction site. Afghanistan is still a country worn and torn by decades of internal and external warfare, ethnic, religious strife, a country where traditional social structures and modernity clashed harshly, wether it was modernity disguised as Imperialism, Communism, or Islamism.
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By Their Friends Shall Ye Know Them

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And by their enemies. It is now clear that the Iraq and treatment of detainees policy of the current US administration has found little favour down at the Financial Times. The FT is hardly a ‘radical rag’ and views expressed there can hardly be dismissed in the same way some might feel able to lightly-brush-aside opinion expressed in more predictably anti-Bush quarters. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that the battle for the heart and mind of the Financial Times has now been definitively lost. Some may not care. I beg to suggest they would be making an important mistake.

Today the FT carries prominently on its website this article from the New York Times:


Al-Qaeda link to Iraq tied to coercion claim

The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration’s heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi’s accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

Khaled Al_Masri Update

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Well, as the FT puts it:

Ms Rice on Wednesday signalled a major policy shift by stating explicitly that US personnel were prohibited from using “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of detainees as she weathered protests in Europe over secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons and alleged torture.

As I have been arguing for some time now Condaleeza Rice is definitely interested in bridge building and not in rubbing salt in old wounds. In doing this she will have to face those inside the United States who favour a more protectionist and isolationsist policy. Ca bouge. Good.

Meantime we could ask the question whether most of the buck for not explictly prohibiting these practices previously will now be passed to Dick Cheney, certainly former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson thinks it might well be:

Sarkozy Cancels Trip To Martinique and Guadeloupe

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I still feel very ambivalent about Nicholas Sarkozy. Clearly France needs reform, and he seems to be the most likely politician to bring it, but some of his words and deeds worry me. His attitude towards positive discrimination as a step towards equality of opportunity for the ‘new French’ is obviously a point in his favour (at least for me it is), on the other hand his ‘tightening’ of the immigration laws is a step in entirely the opposite direction. France needs to resolve its ability handle cultural diversity, not turn its back on it. Today we have another example of what makes me nervous:

“France’s colonial past caught up with Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday as the interior minister cancelled a Caribbean trip to avoid protests over what some claim are political attempts to glorify the country’s history as a colonial power.”

“The last-minute cancellation of Mr Sarkozy’s trip to the French overseas territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe is the latest sign the government has raised racial tensions by introducing a law calling for schools to teach the “positive role” of colonisation.”

In a globalised world, internal politics and external politics are hard to separate, especially when there are parts of France which lie outside the geographical frontiers of Europe. My point would not really be whether everything was bad about colonialism or not, but about what someone who claims to be in favour of ‘deregulation’ is doing introducing a law which states:

“the school syllabus should recognise, in particular, the benefits of the French presence in overseas territories”.

Airbus May Build Factory In China

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This is news. Bloomberg covers the story. China apparently may need 1,790 planes new planes by 2023 Airbus estimate, and it makes sense to, well, make them in China.

Toulouse-based Airbus, which is trailing Boeing in new orders this year, may win an order for as many as 150 planes valued at $9 billion, said people familiar with the negotiations yesterday. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao may announce at least part of the order today at a Paris press conference with his French counterpart Dominique de Villepin, said the people, who declined to be named.

The European planemaker said yesterday after Wen’s visit that it might open a factory in China for assembling A320 planes. Air China and the country’s six airline groups may need 1,790 planes valued at $230 billion by 2023, Airbus estimates. Boeing on Nov. 20 won an order from China for 70 planes worth $4 billion.

Airbus spokeswoman Barbara Kracht declined to comment yesterday on the Chinese order. Ren Houxiang, director of the Civil Aviation Administration of China in Beijing, declined to comment Dec. 2 on the likelihood of China signing an order with Airbus. Repeated calls to the Chinese embassy yesterday weren’t answered.

More from Reuters here.

What did Schily know, and when did he know it?

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This much is uncontroversial: in late 2003 the CIA kidnapped Khalid al-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen, and carried him off to a prison in Afghanistan for interrogation. In the end they released him when they realised that his only crime was to have the same name as some other man they wanted to get their hands on. It took them five months to realise this, five months during which al-Masri says he was tortured. He must be lying about that part, though, because George Bush has said that his administration does not torture.

Now, however, it looks like an extra-large family-size jar of controversy is about to be opened. Otto Schily, who was at the time Germany’s Innenminister — in this context, an analogue to the British home secretary or American director of homeland security — knew about the matter in May 2004 because then-US ambassador Daniel Coats told him. That’s not the controversial part. This is: according to a report in this week’s Spiegel, Schily kept quiet about the Americans kidnapping and falsely imprisoning a German citizen because Coats, his good friend, asked him to.
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