What the world is reading

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejads speech at the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the Kazakh capital of Astana.

THE JERUSALEM POST
Confronting Ahmadinejad

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejads speech at the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the Kazakh capital of Astana has prompted a scathing editorial in The Jerusalem Post. Ahmadinejad had said 60 plus years of Zionism has brought only humiliation and destruction to the Palestinians. The paper is angry not only with the Iranian president,but also with those at the summit who received him with a remarkable equanimity as he spouted his vicious verbal abuse of Israel,the US and the West. But the Astana speech is just a minor precursor to the really big show8230;Come September,the head of the Islamic Republic will likely attendand addressthe UN General Assembly in New York. And here,as he has done since 2005,he will most likely blast Israel. So,the Post wants him arrested. Instead of being allowed to traipse around the world attending respectable conferences and forums and being received with honour,Ahmadinejad should be arrested.

FOREIGN POLICY
Moral hazard at NATO

In his last policy speech as US defense secretary,Robert Gates ripped into his policymaking peers at NATO headquarters in Brussels for allowing significant shortcomings in NATO in military capabilities,and in political will to occur. This,Robert Haddick writes in Foreign Policy,was no doubt sparked by the realisation that his Gates department has become the victim of moral hazard8230;Gates and many other US policymakers see an alliance with too many free riders; Gates noted that only five of the 28 allies spend more than the agreed target of 2 per cent of GDP on defense,Haddick writes. In the short term,Gates fears that the US will have to bail out the Libya operation. Over the longer term,the moral hazard issue extends beyond NATO into the Western Pacific,the South China Sea,and soon the Persian Gulf.

The Guardian
We invent enemies to buy the bombs

Simon Jenkins is not convinced. Gates,he says,is frustrated,no doubt,but it is because the military-industrial complex is no longer making a killing. Jenkins begins his argument with a poser: Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Why? Because the military-industrial complex has to sell the bombs,so it invents enemies,like Libya. Gates berated Europes failure of political will in not maintaining defence spending, Jenkins wrote in The Guardian. He said NATO had declined into a two-tier alliance between those willing to wage war and those who specialise in soft humanitarian,development,peacekeeping and talking tasks. Peace,he implied,is for wimps. Real men buy bombs,and drop them.

THE NEW YORKER
The Invisible Army

There are more than seventy thousand of them. They were promised well-paying jobs and a good life work,but ended up in conditions resembling indentured servitude. This is not the story from a Stalinist labour camp or of miners in sub-Saharan Africa. This is the heartbreaking storybrilliantly captured in all its tragic sadness by The New Yorkers Sarah Stillmanof the third-country nationals,the unwitting recruits for the Pentagons invisible army: cooks,cleaners,construction workers,fast-food clerks,electricians,and beauticians from the worlds poorest countries who service US military logistics contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. These workers,primarily from South Asia and Africa,often live in barbed-wire compounds on US bases,eat at meagre chow halls,and host dance parties featuring Nepalese romance ballads and Ugandan church songs.