The Londoner

The announcement of significant new Israeli settlement construction in East Jerusalem has put the spotlight on the city, but the changes it has undergone since 2000, when the parties first negotiated its fate, are far broader and have far deeper roots.  Israelis, Palestinians and the international community must adjust their strategies accordingly, or Arab East Jerusalem will continue its perilous decline, with catastrophic consequences for all. A pair of companion reports from the International Crisis Group describes how East Jerusalem has been altered in recent years, physically, but also socially, politically and emotionally. Extreme Makeover? (I): Israel’s Politics of Land and Faith in East Jerusalem , shows how the combination of Israeli settlement construction around and within East Jerusalem and increased religious activism has raised the costs of any future plan entailing partitioning the city. Extreme Makeover? (II): The Withering of Arab Jerusalem descr...

Scotland Independence  If the independence debate was over , we’d all be talking about the political intervention going on, writes Brian Monteith AS THE end of 2012 approaches, I am drawn to look back on the generally lamentable quality of political discourse in Scotland and ask what would we discuss if the issue of independence did not dominate the landscape so much? Sadly, it is difficult to answer this question with any excitement or anticipation because it is becoming clearer by the day that were Scotland to be independent , little would change within the existing consensus of our political elite or its corpulent supplicants that form so much of what is called our civic society. It is occasionally suggested that out of the SNP, and following the collapse of the unionist Scottish Conservatives suddenly left without a purpose, a new right-of-centre party will rise up and that Scotland will instead move towards a more ec...

If there is one man who deserves the credit for the growing Turkish-Kurd rapprochement , it’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani of Iraqi Kurdistan . Five years ago Kurds and foreigners alike laughed in his face when he told them that not only did he want Iraqi Kurdistan to export its own oil , but that he wanted to export it to Turkey , which has had an intractable problem with its own large Kurdish minority . Barzani’s strategy was one of patience: starting with confidence-building with the Turks and then coaxing small oil companies and then larger ones to risk Baghdad’s ire to drill for oil not only in the autonomous region but in territory disputed by both Barzani’s government and the Iraqi central government. Barzani sat down with TIME on December 13 to talk about the Turks, his stormy relationship with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the potential for an independent Kurdish state –and how that would affect members of the non-Arab ethnicity , which lives in ...

After all this misery, how can Syrians live together again? Part of his job was to ensure that religious clerics did not preach outside the government's line. If they did, he would unleash his men to arrest and torture them - and then monitor them for the rest of their lives. "We're fighting Wahhabism whenever we find it," the officer once told a new graduate in Sharia studies , who had visited him to build trust and avoid any future arrest. This young imam , now a commander of an anti-regime faction, says this officer acted with the callous, pathological arrogance characteristic of the Baathist regime . Then in mid-November, Abu Imad and 20 of his crew were killed in a battle with the Free Syrian Army . His body, dumped in the street, lay there for days; no one was willing to bury it. Scenes like that may bring closure to those whose kinsfolk or friends have been killed by the regime's forces in the most brutal ways imaginable. Many hope to ...

Steep U.S. drawdown in Afghanistan brings substantial risks The Obama administration appears determined to vacate Afghanistan as fast as possible. If the latest leaks are to be believed, officials are willing to leave as few as 6,000 U.S. troops behind after 2014 , concentrated at the Bagram air base and a few other installations around Kabul . The mind boggles at what this would mean in military terms. Consider one simple fact: Kandahar , the city where the Taliban movement started, is 310 miles southwest of Kabul . Imagine that intelligence analysts have identified a “high-value target” — say, a terrorist facilitator with links to both al-Qaeda and the Taliban — in Kandahar. How would the U.S. military capture or kill him without a secure base in Kandahar ? This scenario is, on some level, fanciful, because the lack of a U.S. presence on the ground around Kandahar would make it very difficult to generate useful intelligence. Ho...

“A modest man,” Winston Churchill supposedly quipped about Clement Attlee , his successor as primeminister , “but then he has so much to be modest about.” We should say the same about economists, particularly their ability to forecast anything in a useful and timely manner. Those predicting an imminent American economic decline have usually been no exception. This time, though, they may be on to something. Prevailing arguments about when the era of U.S. dominance would end, and which country would supplant it, have been wildly and consistently wrong for half a century. In the 1950s, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was taken seriously when he told Western ambassadors “We will bury you.” Japan was supposedly going to be No. 1; now the question is whether the precipitous decline in its working-age population will generate a fiscal crisis. Today, his country no longer exists. In the 1980s, The Germans -- or Europeans more broadly -- were thought to be on the b...

The requisites for a U.S. secretary of state , along with intelligence and judgment, are a knowledge of foreign policy, an understanding of domestic politics, and, ideally, first-hand experience of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “brutality and stupidity” of war. Senator John Kerry , who was tapped by President Barack Obama to succeed Hillary Clinton , checks off all those boxes. He has been an engaged diplomat, a successful politician with gravitas and a decorated combat veteran. Much of his 28-year Senate career has focused on national security. He was among the few young Americans of privilege who fought in Vietnam . Clinton , though unlike most modern-day secretaries of state, he understands how U.S. politics affects foreign policy on issues from the Middle East to China . Massachusetts Democrat has won six statewide races. He knows how Washington works. Like The 69- year-old “Senator Kerry was the most prominent choice of most people o...