Hillary Clinton today signalled a significant shift in US foreign policy by discussing publicly how a nuclear-armed Iran could be contained in the Middle East.
Until today, the shared position of the US, Britain and France was that Iran would not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and no senior official from any of the three countries would discuss the option of containment.
However, Clinton broke that taboo during a visit to Thailand, when she pledged enhanced US protection for Washington's Gulf allies, implying nuclear protection, if Iran succeeded in building a bomb.
ISRAELI PRIME minister Binyamin Netanyahu yesterday rejected American calls to halt Jewish construction in Arab east Jerusalem, stressing that Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem was not up for discussion.
His comments at the weekly Israeli cabinet meeting came after Israel's ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, was summoned to the state department and told that the Obama administration opposed Israeli plans to build at the site of the historic Shepherd's hotel in the capital's Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood.
The current stand-off in Honduras,
in which the coup government headed by Roberto Micheletti is refusing
to allow the return of elected president Manuel Zelaya, is raising
questions about who is in charge of US foreign policy for the hemisphere.
The conventional view of Robert McNamara, who passed away a few days ago, is that after serving as the chief engineer of the disastrous U.S. war in Vietnam, he went on in 1968, to serve as president of the World Bank. In this way, he sought to salve his troubled conscience by delivering development assistance to poor countries.
The reality is, as usual, more complex.
Is President Obama innocent of the events occurring in Honduras,
specifically the coup launched by the Honduran military resulting in
the abduction and forced deportation of democratically elected
President Manuel Zelaya? Obama has denounced the coup and demanded
that the rules of democracy be honored. Still, several troubling
questions remain.
The Obama administration deserves praise for its response to the
coup in Honduras. It sends a hopeful signal that Washington's
traditional support for such undemocratic power grabs has ended.
Masked soldiers stormed the Honduran presidential palace in the early
morning hours of June 28 and violently seized President Manuel Zelaya.
Still in his pajamas, the president was forced at gunpoint onto a plane
and flown to Costa Rica.
The military coup that overthrew Honduras's elected president,
Manuel Zelaya, brought unanimous international condemnation. But some
country's responses have been more reluctant than others, and
Washington's ambivalence has begun to raise suspicions about what the
US government is really trying to accomplish in this situation.
Facing
an unprecedented popular uprising against his autocratic rule and his
apparently fraudulent re-election, Iran's right-wing president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad has attempted to blame the United States. A surprising
number of bloggers on the left have rushed to the defense of the
right-wing fundamentalist leader.
