8 October 2002 Pakistan: The Persistence of Democracy By Gwynne Dyer Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf was so determined to ensure that neither of his two democratically elected predecessors made a comeback that he made a few constitutional changes before calling parliamentary elections. Both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif served two terms as prime minister, so …
5 October 2002 Lula and the Markets By Gwynne Dyer George Soros, the world’s leading currency speculator, told a Brazilian newspaper in August that the 170 million Brazilians simply wouldn’t be allowed to have Labour Party leader Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva as their president. The higher his standing rose in the opinion polls, the …
29 September 2002 Ivory Coast: The End of the Great Exception By Gwynne Dyer Another African country is sliding over the edge, and this time it’s one of the continent’s few success stories, Ivory Coast. A bloody coup attempt, French and American troops flying in to evacuate trapped whites, a looming civil war: deja vu …
26 September 2002 The Arsenal of Evil the Cat By Gwynne Dyer Cartoon villains have no need of complex personalities or even motives; they’re just evil, that’s all. From the Joker in the old Batman comics down to Evil the Cat in ‘Earthworm Jim’, they seek to destroy our hero and conquer the universe simply …
22 September 2002 Kashmir Is Still Ticking By Gwynne Dyer “The Pakistani uranium enrichment facilities, as far as we know, are working three shifts around the clock,” said Zia Mian, a Pakistani physicist at Princeton University, in late May. So far as we know, they still are. The threat of a war over Kashmir is …
PAPERS THAT HELD THE ‘SADDAM’S OPTIONS’ ARTICLE BECAUSE OF THE MONDAY LETTER TO THE UN MAY WISH TO USE THIS UPDATED VERSION. ALL CHANGES ARE IN PARAS TWO AND THREE. 17 September 2002 Saddam’s Options By Gwynne Dyer Put yourself in Saddam Hussein’s boots. What are his options now? There was a global sigh of …
9 September 2002 Kaliningrad: Behind the Blue Curtain By Gwynne Dyer It’s actually half the size of Belgium, but the countries get bigger as you go east across Europe so it looks very small on the map. Legally, it’s just another region of Russia — the home region of President Vladimir Putin’s wife Lyudmila, in …
5 September 2002 Why Did the Target Change? By Gwynne Dyer Beyond grief and anger, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States should raise a question in the minds of Americans: when and why did the target change? Later this year or early next, unless the Bush administration changes course radically, there …
2 September 2002 An Error in the Basque Country By Gwynne Dyer What’s happening in Spain doesn’t make sense. Last week, as the police dragged members of the recently ‘illegalised’ Basque separatist party Batasuna from their party offices in Bilbao, the evicted activists chanted “pim, pam, pum” (bang, bang, bang) — in effect a threat …
29 August 2002 The Munich Analogy By Gwynne Dyer If you really want to attack somebody and you can’t come up with any convincing reasons, your best tactic is to accuse your opponents of being appeasers who are planning another Munich. Which is why US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has taken to comparing himself to …