peacefare.net

Good talk. As for Iraq being held up as a model in the region, that’s going to take a while: in Syria, papers (US, I think) are reporting people saying “anything but Iraq” – things are quiet there now, but how many hundreds of thousands had to die to get to this point?

Your comments on the outbreak of civility among parliamentarians were encouraging. The desire to keep the country together goes back a ways, I think – there certainly wasn’t much support for Joe Biden’s idea of breaking up the country, maybe just because small, weak countries with aggressive neighbors generally don’t fare well in the world. Is there any sense of Libyan national feeling, I wonder? It’s a fairly recent formation, and maybe a federation of Tripolitania (plus/minus the south) and Cyrenaica would be easier to implement than a single government. At least both parts of the country have oil and aren’t in danger of becoming economic basket cases. Even when the oil runs out, they’re ideally situated for enormous concentrated-solar installations that would allow them to continue sending energy to Europe.

As for the need for strong courts – do you think maybe this is being overdone in Kosovo? How many states in the world could have become self-sustaining with the kind of meddling by the internationals Kosovo is being subjected to? Meaning here, having internationals on their Supreme Court. Deciding that Sejdiu was in some theoretical way still “party head” despite his efforts to make clear he had no practical influence plunged the country into political turmoil at the worst possible time, and the current problems with Pacolli may be worse, since he’s not going so quietly. (The only bright spot may be the negotiations, where the head of the Serb team remarked – with some surprise? – that their proposals are not meeting with the expected support. No, this isn’t an international conspiracy to return Kosovo to Serb control.)

Your (dual) comments on Nabucco were encouraging – you both seem to assume that eventually it’s going to get built. During his visit to Serbia, Putin assured the country that work on South Stream would definitely start soon (encouraging all kinds of ideas in certain segments of the population about Serbia eventually having Europe by the throat (just like Ukraine, right?), with Russian military bases to defend the pipeline on Serbian soil able to threaten Kosovo and in general make Serbia a country to be feared and respected. Or at least, feared. They keep overlooking, after an hysterical day or so, the annual reports from the statistics office showing that, at present rates, Serbs will have died out as a nation in a couple of hundred years. Tito used to become the godfather of every 7th (or was it, the 9th?) child born in a family, and he had quite a brood. These days, he’d have to lower the number to, say, three in order to get a mention in the nightly news.