Center for a New American Security

My officemate Abe has a good new report he edited on the global commons worth checking out.

Londonstani spent most of the summer on a housing estate clinging to the outskirts of Bristol. The job in hand was to investigate racism for a documentary by living as an immigrant in the kind of area many recent arrivals are housed in by local councils. But the experience also shed light on how the process of radicalisation plays out on the streets of modern Britain. Considering the recent debate about Prevent in the UK, Londonstani thinks it'll be useful to share his observations.

The UK's Department of Communities and Local Government is conducting an enquiry into the UK's government's Prevent strategy, one strand of the government's overall plan to tackle terrorism and its causes.

Kerry Lugar is the talk of Islamabad. And as tempted as Londonstani was at first to assume everyone was referring to a new pop star rival to Britney it turns out Kerry Lugar is actually a piece of US legisation that triples non-military aid to Pakistan.

Unless my alma mater has suddenly ceased to be the stingiest institution in the Levant, I'm thinking the American University of Beirut wasn't the one that paid for Christopher Hitchens to travel to Beirut. The word on the street is that Hitchens was in Beirut as part of a junket paid for by Lebanon's March 14th coalition and its stateside lobby.

Oh man. Poor Condoleezza Rice. Her honest-to-God worst fear was that our hardline stance on Syria was going to leave us looking stupid because, in the end, we would be the only ones not talking with Syria. She warned the Israelis time and time again not to talk with the Syrian regime.

Abu Muqawama bought and read the New York Review of Books yesterday mainly because of Max Rodenbeck's review of Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East. Rodenbeck -- the excellent Middle Ea

With today's announcement that the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League-N will seek to reinstate the Pakistani Supreme Court and its Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the contest for democracy in Pakistan enters a crucial stage. Beyond reinstating the court, the two parties will seek to undo a Constitutional amendment that allows the President to suspend Parliament.

As I sit somewhere in the former Soviet Union, I long for a simpler world of mutual destruction where Colin Gray is relevant and congressmen still know how to party.

Longing complete--the Soviet Union is after all a distant element of my childhood—I consider a small hypocrisy in our foreign policy.