The news that Iranian television is broadcasting government-approved demands that US troops STAY in Iraq until the situation is stabilized offers an extraordinary opportunity.
Not, as Tony Blair has suggested for direct talks between the US and Iran about the future of Iraq – a proposal the White House has already frowned on – but for a way of disengaging ourselves from the region without it looking like a defeat.
What I am proposing is that we outflank the false dichotomy between “cutting and running” and “staying the course” by convening a Middle East Peace Conference.
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THE FACE OF LIBERTY
a picture essay
In the middle of the nineteenth century, in the French town
of Colmar in Alsace Lorraine, a highly respectable
Protestant widow named Charlotte Bartholdi sat stone-faced
in the parlor of her charming little house at 30, Rue de
Marchands. Her eccentric, genealogy-loving elder son,
Charles, had fallen in love with a beautiful young woman
and wanted to marry her. The only problem, he explained,
was that she was Jewish: but as he was convinced they would
make each other happy and she would bring him the stability
he so much needed, he was sure his mother would give her
consent.
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GAZING
ON THE FACE OF GOD
a
picture essay
I came across the following image, in the National
Geographic Magazine of June 2002 (Empires Across the Andes)
showing “The Staff God” – a powerful deity thought by the
pre-Inca peoples of the Andes known as the Tiwanaku to
control lightning, rain and life-sustaining crops.
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INDIAN
ROPE TRICK
Sometimes when I opened the front door of our house in the
port city of Kingston Upon Hull on the north east coast of
England I would find that a grey wall had been built
immediately in front of it.
It appeared to be solid, but it was not.
It was fog from the North Sea.
That it was permeable was suggested by a glowing street
lamp floating somewhere in the distance like a wandering
autumn sun, but that insubstantiality served only to make
the wall more sinister, because I knew that although I
could step through it, once I had done so I would
disappear.
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DELIGHTS
From my earliest
childhood certain prospects and memories have filled me
with such delight that bringing them to mind is finding
oneself unexpectedly before a bright and blazing fire.
on a dark winter’s afternoon. During the course of a
lifetime of reading I have come across passages in
literature which have ignited that delight so spontaneously
once read they are never forgotten.
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