First - Egypt - from Israel National News:
Egypt Struck by Swarm of Locusts Ahead of Passover
As a reminder to those who thought the account related in the Passover Haggadah might have been an exaggeration - think again. Millions of locusts have swooped down in a swarm from the sky on to the land of Egypt.
The locust plague struck over the weekend in the Giza region, home to a cluster of famous pyramids, according to reports in Arab media.
Next - Afghanistan - from Le Monde diplomatique:
The new normal in Baghdad
After violence that shattered hundreds of thousands of lives and left nearly everyone with a tragic story to tell, life in Iraq has settled into a strange normality - with no discernible direction or clear future. "How do you make sense of the last ten years?" said a novelist, who is trying to do just that. "The problem is not the starting point, but where to end. To write the history of the Algerian civil war, you had to wait till it was over. Here, we are still in the middle of a sequence of events whose outcome we cannot see." The structure of his novel, in which each chapter relates to a different year, means he remains hostage to a political system that continues to keep the country in suspense.
A decade after the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains in crisis, although you wouldn't know it from visiting Baghdad. The suicide attacks, car bombs and other explosive devices used, and abused, by the resistance and sectarian militias are much rarer than they were a few years ago, leading the world's media to lose much of its interest in Iraq.
More - Obama's quick pull-out:
All these mistakes could have been gradually corrected, but the US sinned above all by omission. It ignored the objectives it had set itself and withdrew before agreement had been reached on the issues that will continue to haunt Iraq for years: revision of the constitution, allocation of disputed territories, distribution of resources, relations between central and regional government, the prime minister�s prerogatives, the institutionalisation of counter-powers, the bylaws of parliament, the structure of the security forces, etc. Everything has yet to be negotiated and renegotiated, from one political crisis to the next.
A bit more:
The US turned Iraq into a parody of itself by projecting a simplistic vision of society, imposing crude concepts of Ba'athism, Saddamism, terrorism, sectarianism and tribalism, and building a political edifice founded on these cliches. Such self-fulfilling stereotyping is reminiscent of the colonial mindset, even though the US invasion was never meant to colonise.
A long and sobering read -- we went in -- we should have stayed in to finish the job.
