Archives for September 2010

This piece from Time magazine exposes right-wing, well-armed militias forming across the US. This lot aren't interesting in having a Tea Party - they're preparing for war against the US authorities. Many of those interviewed "voiced grim suspicions about President Obama and the federal government in general", writes journalist Barton Gellman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigation into former Vice-President Dick Cheney's unprecedented power in the Bush White House.

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Before the advent of photography most subjects of a kingdom probably had no idea what their monarch looked like, unless they saw him or her in person or were lucky enough to get glimpse of a painted portrait.

This is what it must have felt like living in North Korea all week. The only pictorial evidence we had that Kim Jong-un, hitherto to be referred to as the "Brilliant Comrade" even existed was a grainy black and white picture of an eight-year-old boy.

Well, North Korea has burst out of the Middle Ages and plunged - caution to the wind - into the modern era of video by treating the world to moving pictures of one of the planet's most otherworldly political experiences, the North Korean Workers Party Congress.

There, in the front row, wedged between his aunt and a general festooned with enough medals to give a metal detector indigestion is the Brilliant Comrade, looking slightly startled by all the adulation and exceedingly well nourished.

All the signals have now been sent by the regime. The younger Kim is our man.

We have no idea how long the dauphin will have to wait before ascending the throne or who, if anyone, will try to manipulate him, but the Kim dynasty seems intent on avoiding early retirement.

If I were working for the US State Department I would take another look at that yearbook photo from the Brilliant Comrade's Swiss boarding school and start ringing around some of his former classmates.

You never know, perhaps the world's newest and most inscrutable heir is even on Facebook under a different name.

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Europe is on strike. America shrugs. We are indeed divided by a common crisis. In the United States, one in seven adults of working age is now deemed to live or survive in poverty.

Property bubbles have burst on both sides of the Atlantic, and the economic recovery is sluggish and sporadic. In economic terms, the Atlantic Ocean has become a millpond. And yet Americans look at strikes in Athens, Madrid or Paris with a sense of derision verging on disgust. Here they go again, those lilly-livered French, crying over the fact that their retirement age may go up to a horrifying 62 years of age. So much for the solidarity of working people. The main difference between Europe and America is the attitude towards labour.

In Europe, citizens feel entitled to work - it is even written in the German Constitution. There are long memories about what happens to a democracy when unemployment becomes too high. The rise of Hitler would probably not have happened if the ranks of the jobless and hopeless had not swelled to desperate heights.

In the United States, the right to work has to be earned by each individual. Despite the excesses of Wall Street, the outsourcing of jobs, the tyranny of the corporate bottom line, losing a job is more a matter of personal shame here than of collective failure. People tend to blame themselves more than their employer. This may seem strange, but it accounts for the absence of strike action in a work force that, Europeans would think, had every right to march and mount the barricades.

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I am reminded of China's rise almost every day when I drive past the brand new Chinese embassy in Washington, a beer bottle's throw from our house. Not that I would ever deploy such a projectile.

It is an ivory white colossus with tinted windows and a diamond shaped hole in the front facade to enable the dragon - that threatens all structures - to fly through and thus avoid knocking it all down. It was built in less than a year by an army of Chinese workers, who had been flown in from their mother country and housed in makeshift dormitories - erected under patriotic Chinese banners written in Mandarin.

Beijing has created a little corner of China right in the heart of northwest Washington. The hole for the dragon has nice feng shui and is a reminder that superstition lingers in China's otherwise highly pragmatic expansion.

And as Ann Applebaum points out in her column in today's Washington Post, that expansion has been proceeding apace, mostly under our radars. It is a mercantile mission to exploit and own some of the world's most precious resources.

In Afghanistan, American troops may be sacrificing blood and treasure to make the country safe for education and voting. But it is a Chinese company that has won the rights to exploit one of the world's biggest copper deposits. In Iraq, it is Chinese companies that have acquired bigger stakes in the oil business than their American rivals.

In other words, Ms Applebaum concludes, America fights while China does business. Some of the business is in rare earth metals that most of us don't even know exist, but without which our Blackberries would go, well, black. China now dominates the world market in promethium and ytterbium.

China today is similar to what the East India Company was like in the 18th Century, when its expansion into India and beyond for nutmeg, cloves and tea laid the mercantilist foundations of the British Empire. The question is when will China bolster trade with gunship diplomacy? Is the recent spat with Japan an indication it is doing so already?

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North Korea's dynastic rulers might want to take some time to read a book called Song of Blood and Sword by Fatima Bhutto.

I have just interviewed the Columbia University-educated niece of Benazir Bhutto. She bears a remarkable resemblance to her late aunt. But don't tell her that.

Fatima Bhutto never liked her aunt much in life and seems still to dislike her in death. Ms Bhutto holds her aunt and uncle Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari "morally responsible" for her own father's death at the hands of the Karachi police.

She also believes that Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007, was involved in another uncle's untimely death by poison in the south of France. In fact, the book's jacket sums up the essence of this family drama: Fatima's grandad, uncle, aunt and father were either executed, assassinated or murdered.

"Are you the Borgias of South Asia?" I asked her.

"Yes", she told me, adding the tragedy of her treacherous family has become the tragedy of post-feudal Pakistan.

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**UPDATE: It's a rumour no more. The Worker's Party has appointed Kim Jong-un, the youngest son of North Korea's Dear Leader, a general, according to reports from the reclusive nation's state-controlled media. This is the first concrete indication that the much-discussed succession plan is underway. So how much longer until Jong-un fully replaces Jong-il? I'll leave that question to those tea leaf readers.**

From the chaotic transparency of the US (see below) to the chaotic secrecy of North Korea, where the dynastic process will/could/might/ought to perhaps/probably/possibly take a giant leap forwards, or so we are told by the soothsayers/necromancers/analysts/watchers/experts who have the thankless task of reading the tea leaves of the hermit state.

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It emerged that India had similar discussions with the makers of the BlackBerry, who were conducting bilateral negotiations with numerous governments about how they could continue to provide a mobile email service while allowing authorities to eavesdrop on encrypted internet traffic for security reasons.

According to the New York Times, federal law enforcement and national security officials in the US are now seeking sweeping new regulations that will allow them to keep an eye and an ear on everything from Facebook, to Skype to your beloved BlackBerry. You can see why they insist on this. Who uses a land-line these days to plot a dinner date let alone a terrorist onslaught?

Once again the big question of our post 9/11 time - the right balance between liberty and security - will be raised and haggled over. This is a sporadic, feverish, politically poisoned debate. It is rarely conducted without a nod to guiding principles. It should in theory take place in Congress - which is wishful thinking, especially five weeks before the mid-term elections. It may end up at some stage in the Supreme Court. But whatever the outcome, the rest of the world will be watching closely.

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In an interview with colleagues from BBC Persian television, President Obama has condemned claims by Iran's president that the US may have been behind 9/11 as "hateful" and "offensive". Picking up on the theme, Foreign Policy magazine has a list of the 10 stupidest things said during a UN speech.

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One of the most unpleasant stories I have ever had to cover was what we call a "hooliwatch" in Zaragoza, Spain.

Chelsea FC were taking on the local Spanish team and the Chelsea fans, who had been flown in on a special charter jet, were intent on taking on the whole town.

Despite dozens of Spanish police horses, hundreds of heavily-armed Guardia Civil and a special pen for holding the foreign fans next to the stadium, the city centre became a war-zone after the game.

The rabid fans were wielding knives, screwdrivers or broken bottles. It was like a scene from the Night of the Living Dead. That was 1995.

A decade-and-a-half later, football partisans seem to have become more genteel and gone online, like so much else.

Consider the case of Liverpool football club where angry fans have availed themselves of all the tools of the social media in order to try and oust the club's unpopular co-owner Texan millionaire Tom Hicks.

The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful piece on how Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and the ubiquitous video camera can be used to mobilise support against a rich and powerful proprietor.

I wonder if Chelsea fans would ever dare take on the Russian oligarch who owns their club?

Talking of Facebook... its twenty-something founder Mark Zuckerberg will be on Oprah's couch today - the ultimate on-air celeb image rehab - to announce a gift of $100m to the Newark, New Jersey school system.

Some cynics have suggested that this is an attempt to change the conversation ahead of the semi-fictional Hollywood film which portrays the testy billionaire in a none too flattering light.

The young man who was unable to make friends offline had to create a whole network to harvest them online, it implies amongst other things.

Perhaps. But how many loners do you know who end up changing the world?

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Could the imperilled Commonwealth Games in Delhi become the first in history to be boycotted because of filth? The latest pictures of some bathrooms and bedrooms in the athletes village made my skin crawl. They make the abhorrent ablution facilities of the old Walter Reed military hospital in Washington look like bathroom suites at the Ritz.

We can all identify with filthophobia. We can also imagine the very real security concerns in India after the Mumbai massacre, although our correspondent Chris Morris tells me that authorities seem to have addressed this concern.

What really interests me about the story is how it has highlighted the shortcomings in a country whose booming economy makes us marvel. Yes, India is a power to watch with economic energy to emulate. But friends who live in Delhi also tell me the city is plagued by power cuts and "sewage issues".

Equally intriguing is the contrast with China. Increasingly, Indians look east to China - as opposed to west towards Pakistan - for the rivalry that touches on their self-esteem. If Beijing could host a spectacular Olympic Games HOW can we allow ourselves to mess up with the Commonwealth Games?

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The internet has claimed another scalp.

Blockbuster, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, but represented all over the world with thousands of stores, is filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

And so another family ritual bites the dust.

How many times have we made the trip down to the local video rental store to scour the shelves for something that was suitable for my six-year-old daughter and my 12-year-old son? This always involved finding my son awestruck in front of a film, which would surely give him nightmares - but also one he insisted was educational.

I enjoyed surveying films displayed on shelves like books. Although I also really hated paying out a small fortune in late fees, which by the end seemed to be the only way that these shops were making any money.

Blockbuster's demise is, I suppose, inevitable.

But here is another social activity that has retreated to the goggle-eyed privacy of the internet. With the Kindle and iPad allowing us to carry the Library of Congress in one hand, surely bookshops are next in line on the chopping block?

Call me old fashioned, but I like the look, smell and reverential mood of a bookshop. Long may it last.

In another triumph of the web, Mark Zuckerberg, the under-aged billionaire founder of Facebook joined the dinosaurs of dosh, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, today in the upper echelon of Forbes's richest of the rich list.

I am still not totally convinced by the value of online friendships, which never die in cyberspace but never flourish in real life, or the digital incontinence of tweets.

So, in the spirit of retro-rebellion, perhaps someone should start a movement that shuns the internet, cuts up credit cards, grows its own food, keeps chickens and makes a point of walking to the local bookshops.

On second thoughts...

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The row between China and Japan over a sprinkling of uninhabited islands in the South China Sea is both fascinating and alarming.

The row has been simmering for decades at a relatively low flame. I remember trying to get my bosses in London interested in it in the late 1990s. The understandable response: "Where? What? Why?"

The latest round flared up earlier this month when the Japanese coast guard arrested a Chinese captain after what was little more than a fender bender on the high seas. Now China is flexing its muscles in return. The Chinese foreign minister refused to meet with his Japanese counterpart in the wings of the UN General Assembly, usually a convenient and neutral place to iron out differences.

The Chinese government has even called on local travel agencies to cancel trips to Japan. It is an indication of China's growing economic clout that this has even become a threat. Tourism from China to Japan has increased by 143% in the past year. According to the Wall Street Journal, one major Chinese healthcare company has decided to scrap plans to send 7,500 workers on their annual jolly to Japan.

Isn't it always the smallest things that trigger the fiercest rows and expose the biggest rifts? China versus Japan. One nation waking up to its clout, the other throwing off the post-war shackles of restraint. One to watch.

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Bob Woodward has done it again.

In Bush at War, he exposed the deep rifts between the titans and the departments of the last administration as they locked horns over Iraq.

Now in Obama's Wars, Woodward has shone a glaring light on the disagreements and disgruntlements churned up by that other war - the one in Afghanistan.

It comes during a week when 2010 has been declared the deadliest year for Nato troops in Afghanistan and when local and international observers are trying once again to figure out just how corrupt the latest election has been.

I am not surprised about the name calling between Vice-President Joe Biden and Richard Holbrooke, the administration's bruiser-at-large in the subcontinent. All administrations attract big egos. It's part of the job description.

I wasn't taken aback by the distrust between military types like General James Jones, the National Security Adviser and the civilian types like David Axelrod, the president's spinmeister. It wasn't even such a shock to hear that President Obama was looking first and foremost for an exit strategy, which the Pentagon was reluctant to deliver. It confirmed a suspicion. If his head is already preparing for departure, his heart is hardly likely to be in the fight.

Barack Obama is a reluctant warrior, who didn't want to fall into the trap that gobbled up Lyndon Johnson's presidency: trying to reshape America at home while fighting a costly and futile war abroad.

No, what continues to surprise me is how the White House - any White House - which is so obsessed with being "on message" and water tight with leaks, periodically airs its dirty linen with Bob Woodward, as if he is the confessor-in-chief.

These days Bob doesn't need Deep Throats when he can have song birds. The administration clearly thinks it is better to work with him than against him. They realize that he would dig up the dirt anyway. So they have come to the conclusion that it is better to embrace your potential foe than to alienate him.

Apparently this may have worked because Obama comes across as thoughtful and serious in the book as he draws up his own Afghanistan exit strategy.

But will the nuance of his finely-tuned brain be lost amongst the bold print of the headlines?

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Like Iraq before it, Afghanistan is haunted by the questions that tend to vex discretionary wars.

Why are we there? What are we really trying to do? Can we win? How much blood and treasure should be sacrificed? And so on...

These questions nag us like a tongue returning to an aching tooth and they demand a bit of historical context. If you're interested - and shouldn't we all be? - I urge you to see Nicholas Kent's production of 'The Great Game'.

Played predominantly in the 19th Century with Afghanistan as the board - Russian, British soldiers and Afghan fighters as the pieces - it is this game which created the graveyard of empires. First the British, then the Soviets, and now Nato?

In 12 short plays, Kent tries to examine the fatal allure of Afghanistan. Why did a succession of foreigners want to control it? And why did they keep on failing? The play examines history from a dozen different angles with a mixture of wit and poignancy.

I haven't seen all of it yet. The weekend showings start at 11am and end at 11pm with two long breaks. But what I have seen so far is astonishing. The best line was uttered by the former President of Soviet Afghanistan, Dr Najibullah, in a posthumous imagined conversation with a British aid worker. When lamenting the haunted history of the neighbourhood he points out that "the roots of all our troubles are the imaginings of British Imperial surveyors." He was talking about the colonial officers who blithely drew up maps that owed more to geometry than to tribal borders.

There is a whole history to be written about the curse of bad maps drawn up by the British Empire. After seeing the Great Game in London, Britain's most senior soldier declared he wished he had seen it before deploying troops to Afghanistan. It would have made him a much better commander, he said.

I hope Mr Kent and his troupe of actors get invited to the Pentagon. Unlikely, but he will take his play on tour to Minneapolis, Chicago and New York.

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Just imagine the fear that stalks the newsroom of El Diario de Juarez, the main city paper in Mexico's most dangerous town.

Two journalists have been killed in recent years, covering the war on drugs. One of them was a 21-year-old intern photographer who was shot outside a shopping mall. The other intern who was with him lies critically ill in hospital.

In a poignant attempt to stop the killing, the paper's editor-in-chief decided to devote Sunday's front page to an editorial that was part plea and part plaint. "Que quieren de nosostros?" he asked, using the polite subjunctive form to address the killers of his staff. "What do you want from us?"

I interviewed Gerardo Rodriguez, the editor, last night on World News America. He was in the relative safety of El Paso, Texas, just across the border. He looked terrified and thought long and hard about doing an interview for which he could theoretically have to pay a price.

I asked him if he was prepared to censor himself and his journalists if that's what it took to stay alive. He responded with a defiant NO. The greatest opprobrium in the editorial and the interview was reserved for the legitimate authorities of the city who, Rodriguez charged, are no longer able to protect people and uphold the last shreds of law. It is a powerful indictment of what parts of Mexico have descended to.

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Anti-Pope protesters, more vocal before the pontiff's visit to the UK than during it, may ask themselves this question:

Why did a German pope who is trying to limit the damage from an endemic child sex abuse scandal and who has lurched from one public relations blunder to the next NOT have a disastrous state visit to the island nation that fell out with Rome half a millennium ago?

Like all monarchies, the papacy is at its best when it displays pomp and circumstance with a hint of rhetorical humility. The Pope was as contrite as he has ever been about the abuse in his ranks.

Without hectoring he managed to turn the discussion into a soul searching about Britain's excessive secularisation.

Read Ross Douhat's excellent piece in the New York Times. A country in crisis and in doubt is thirsting for moral guidance and answers. It may well reject them - especially from this Pope - but it's not averse to spending some time on the psychiatrist's couch or in the confessional.

And, let's be honest, even many non-Catholics love a good, all bells and whistles Mass with a protocol and dress code that go back at least a thousand years.

Britain's five million Catholics probably see the Pope in the same light as just about every other Briton sees the Royal Family. They complain about it. They laugh at it. They disagree with much of what is said and done, but they hardly ever want to see royal heads on sticks.

America, with its elected monarchy on a short-term, once-only-renewable lease doesn't have the luxury of separating the executive from the symbolic.

When the divided country is increasingly at its own throat it makes it almost impossible for the office of the president to remain above the fray.

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The coal face of a Monday morning has been made mercifully bearable by brilliant early autumn sunshine and a small piece on the BBC website that caught my attention.

It is grandly entitled "The Ten Most Un-answerable Questions" and weighing in at number three - just after the predictable "What is the meaning of life?" and "Is there a God?" - is that existential unknown, that nagging fissure at the heart of our being: "Do blondes have more fun?"

Number 9 was "Did Tony Soprano die?"

This morning in the Frei household there was only one question that seemed paramount, existential and - if unanswered - potentially life-threatening: "Where is George's soccer stuff?"

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Let's be honest.

We journalists like few things more than a political insurrection. After a year-and-a-half of trench warfare over healthcare reform and the like, American politics is being churned up by a Tea Party where civilities have been drowned out by the sound of crashing china.

Newspaper columns have suddenly sprung to life again with a mixture of awe, anger and refreshing reason (read today's column by David Brooks in the New York Times).

A former stand-up comedian turned TV preacher and a woman who believes masturbation should be banned - surely Christine O'Donnell's true Achilles heel - suddenly need to be traken seriously.

The mean-spirited tribe of scribblers is licking its chops. Others are vexed.

I sat next to a diplomat the other day who was tearing his three remaining hairs out over this week's primary results.

"What do I tell my superiors?" he lamented. "They want clear analysis, they want predictions..."

Foreign governments who had assumed that an Obama administration would end America's quixotic adventures under George W Bush and put the country back on a more predictable, genteel course are wondering whether an even wilder ride is just beginning.

But the palest faces in the arena probably belong to the grandees of the Grand Old Party.

What used to be run like a gentleman's club with an unstated but understood protocol of succession and patrician patronage has now been rattled from below.

This is a real revolution in Republican ranks. It can be explained by the Great Recession, the exposure of the American Dream as, well, a dream and by a new intolerance with entitlement.

It is underpinned by an appalling discrepancy in incomes, by the heavy hand of government, by the limitations of America at home and abroad.

There are many more reasons, for sure. But the first shot of the revolution was fired at the 2008 GOP convention in St Paul, Minnesota, when an almost-unknown Sarah Palin had the grand old men rolling in the aisles with her tough talk about moose, pitbulls and lipstick.

Little did the likes of McCain, Romney and Crist know then that they would end up in the cross-hairs, hunted by someone of their own creation.

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I find myself back on the Washington DC to New York La Guardia shuttle, perhaps the most serious flight anywhere on the planet. My eyes are blinded by all the white starched shirts. Conversation has been suspended as everyone fiddles with their BlackBerrys.

I am guessing that at least half the passengers are lobbyists. Mercifully this is one of the shortest flights you can take in the US. It lasts only 35 minutes, God willing, which is just as well because this is the flight they banned toilet trips on for a few years after 9/11.

They didn't want anyone getting up or hovering in the aisle even to answer the most urgent call of nature. I used to call this the bursting bladder shuttle. Now you can have a pee. These days that counts for luxury on a plane.

We spoke to Matthew Dowd last night, the man who helped to get President George W Bush re-elected in 2004. In light of recent primary election results, he spoke eloquently about the rise of popular anger in America.

This anger still packs unknown momentum, which will hurt both parties in the autumn and perhaps beyond. Want proof? Just look at today's foreclosure numbers.

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America is experiencing its insurrection at the polls. China, which doesn't allow these things to be expressed in votes, seems to be getting it on the internet.

The New York Times has a fascinating piece by columnist Thomas Friedman about the swelling regiment of bloggers in China. The number is estimated to be 70 million and rising. More than the entire population of the UK is busy blogging - mind boggling.

The tone seems to be predominantly populist and nationalist and Friedman raises the question whether this will push the ruling Communist Party in directions it doesn't want to go. Beijing is famously terrified by orchestrated displays of public emotion, not choreographed by them.

The pro-democracy students broke that rule in Tiananmen Square. So did Falun Gong. But I also remember armoured personal carriers on the streets of Beijing in 2000 when the capital won the Olympic Games. The authorities don't like irrational exuberance, even if it has a patriotic tone.

Will they tolerate it on the internet? "We the people!" is a cry you can hear from Wilmington to Wuhan.

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I talked to Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief at Mashable.com about the new Twitter.com homepage.

What do you think? Will you spend more time on the site because of the changes?

You can follow Adam here and read my tweets here.

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In Washington DC, Adrian Fenty, arguably the best mayor in decades, whose policies lowered crime rates, improved school results and were welcomed by the public, was crushed by rival Democrat Vincent Gray for being too aloof and high-handed. Even the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly, called him "the Jerk DC needs" in its endorsement. He had been widely accused of being unable to explain his ground breaking policies to the voters in simple but not simplistic language. He was labouring under the charge of erudite elitism.

There is a warning here for President Barack Obama. Mr Obama is still more popular than his policies but he too has a tendency to sound professorial. He too has been accused of failing to feel the pain. Even if a doctor prescribes the right medicine we want them to have a reassuring bedside manner.

In Republican ranks the battle between the populist Tea Party wing and the Establishment Cocktail Party wing grinds on. Christine O'Donnell of the tiny state of Delaware has become the East Coast answer to Sarah Palin. She even looks like the patron saint of anti-Washington disgruntlement, whose endorsement translated into votes last night. The pundits believe that her victory in the state's Republican Senate primary virtually ensures that the GOP will not win Vice-President Joe Biden's old seat, and that this pattern will repeat itself elsewhere.

No wonder the Democrats have been cheering as if they had just won an election. They believe the rise of the right fringe is their best chance of avoiding utter failure this autumn. But they may have misundestimated, to borrow a phrase, the spirit of insurrection that once swept their own president to power in a tidal wave of disgust with the culture of entitlement.

In the era of self doubt, when American dreams at home and abroad are being shattered, there is still no limit to the populist anger. It promises to be an autumn full of surprises.

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I dimly remember when things were very different. When my family first moved to Britain from Germany in 1972 we had to light candles in our central London home because of repeated power cuts. There were constant strikes. The IMF was running the economy. Taxes were ludicrously high and to have a hot bath one often needed to "feed a boiler" with fifty-pence coins.

Britain was the "sick man of Europe"; hardly anyone was happy. But is it possible that this relatively recent gloom now allows Britain to embrace the austerity foisted upon its people by the new coalition government? Has the stiff upper lip made a comeback? Do we Brits embrace austerity the way we embrace our failures at Wimbledon? And should America, the last bastion of the quivering lower lip take note? Read Anne Applebaum's piece in the Washington Post.

While we agonize over degrees of austerity, Cuba, which has had plenty of it as long as anyone can remember, has just axed a cool 1,000,000 state workers it no longer needs. Has the "terrible job for life" guarantee of Fidel's proletarian revolution just been abolished with the flick of a pen? And whose pen?

Fidel has come back from the virtual grave to lash out in the most surprising ways. First, in last week's interview to the Atlantic Monthly he berated Iran's president for pushing the world closer to nuclear war. And now this?

Something is afoot in Havana. Are the Castro brothers falling out? Has Fidel had a conversion?

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For anyone who wants an historic perspective on "the graveyard of empires" in Afghanistan, do go and see The Great Game. Named after the geopolitical board-game, with real soldiers, played between the Tsar's Russia and Queen Victoria's British Empire in the 19th Century.

Twelve short, brilliantly written plays weave a narrative from the first Anglo Afghan War to the Soviet invasion and to today's increasingly precarious campaign against the Taleban.

I interviewed British theatre director Nicolas Kent about his ambitious project for tonight's World News America.

After harvesting a round of accolades in Britain, from the country's most senior soldier to the equally tough crowd of theatre critics, Kent has brought the Great Game on tour to the US.

He starts in Washington's Shakespeare Theatre this Wednesday.

He told me that he was against the war when he first started the project three years ago. Although he now has much better understanding of the shortcomings and short sightedness of today's military mission, he also now believes in its value.

It is much easier to be against Nato's military involvement from the comfort of one's porch in Washington. When you witness the brutality of the Taleban at close quarters, as most recent visitors to the country have done, the question becomes far more complicated.

One is caught between sympathy for the cause and resignation at its handling.

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Things are looking down for Mr Obama ahead of the November mid-term elections

The newspapers already seem to have entered into the ghoulish graveyard spirit. The Sunday tomes were even more weighed down than usual by discussion of America's decline. Tom Friedman in the New York Times, who is something of a master at taking the comparative global pulse, believes that the US needs a spiritual rebooting to wrench it from its apathy and relative decline.

In the same paper Matt Bai argues that the failures and disappointments of the Obama presidency should be viewed less in terms of the man and more in terms of the historic moment. The further we get from presidencies the more we tend to see them as belonging to periods rather than individuals. He quotes the presidential historian Robert Dallek, who believes that this presidency will be defined by its limitations and the limitations of America. Arguably so was George W Bush's. The difference is that this president seems to be more aware of the limits of his own power and is planning accordingly. Could Mr Obama become the Mikhail Gorbachev of the US? Discuss.

Having said that, the Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece this morning about the biggest arms deal in history, which is is worth $60bn (£39bn) and is about to be signed by Saudi Arabia and the US. This will apparently safeguard 75,000 jobs in the US. Isn't that always the argument used by arms manufacturers and their policy makers? It will also beef up the biggest Sunni power - now that Iraq has been militarily neutered - to rival Shia Iran. Why does the phrase unintended consequences spring to mind?

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The Economist takes a look at the growing political and demographic power of American Latinos. Noting that much of the western half of America was once part of Mexico, the magazine writes:

They were then marginalised for a century and a half, when Anglos [non-Hispanic whites] dominated American society and culture. And they are now bound to play a big role in America's future."

A controversial prime minister seeks to define his legacy, observes John Lanchester in the New Yorker magazine, in piece headlined, wittly as ever, The Which Blair Project.

Meanwhile, friend of World News America Ted Koppel writes in the Washington Post that on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, America must stop fulfilling Osama Bin Laden's dreams.

On the inescapable subject of Pastor Terry Jones and his plan to burn copies of the Koran, Der Spiegel has an interview with his estranged daughter, who says she believes her father has gone mad and needs help.

The story prompts Time Magazine's website to publish a list of the top 10 most gratuitously provocative protest acts. On the list beside Jones: an anti-Iraq war "vomit-in" and Thai Red Shirts' spilling of their own blood.

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It appears that the Florida pastor who vexed the world and its leaders this week with his proposed Koran burning is more than just an extremist Islamophobe with a luxuriating moustache.

Terry Jones, 58, is also the author of a polemical book entitled "Islam is of the Devil" and until last year he ran a small and once thriving fundamentalist church in Cologne, Germany. He left the church, and Germany, after the congregation finally kicked him out for his radical views.

According to a fascinating article in Der Spiegel Online, even before that he had aroused the suspicion of Germany's "sect commissioners" who monitored his "extremist demonology". Jones apparently demanded blind obedience from his followers and denounced Cologne, his adopted home for more than a decade as a "city from hell founded by Nero's mother".

The local tourist board must have been happy to see him depart. Perhaps the Chamber of Commerce in Gainesville, Florida should be on its guard - although Nero is very unlikely to be involved this time. It is bizarre and alarming to think that a fringe figure like Jones could create such a global response and eat up so much of my blog time.

Now that this episode appears to be over it's time to focus on the real issue, which will really depress you. Where exactly is America heading? Its economy has gone from swagger to stagger. Its armies are getting stretched too much. Its clout is diminished. There is serious talk of relative but permanent decline. As ever David Brooks in the New York Times offers a sober and thoughtful perspective.

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It seems like a case of very local and very weird church politics being played out on the global stage, broadcast by all the world's electronic media with potentially serious complications.

Wherever this story ends up it has ended a sultry summer of hyperventilation about Islamic cultural centres near Ground Zero and Islamophobia in the US. It would probably never have reached this degree of prominence if the president, his secretary of state and his most senior soldier had not spoken about it. Perhaps they saw the storm coming and had no choice. Just imagine if the Korans were being burned and no one had seen it coming.

So here we are. It has reminded Barack Obama of a dilemma. He can never match his condemnation of such a stunt with the kind of action that someone like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, for instance, would not have hesitated to take. That is the whole point of freedom of speech and the separation of church and state - two principles which are fundamental to American law and culture.

The events of this summer have become a wake up call about the state of Muslims in America. According to media reports, they feel as insecure now as they did just after 9/11. It has potentially imperilled Obama's outreach to the Muslim world and it has raised questions about how we, the media, should cover such events.

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Online magazine Slate.com finds a lesson in the international outrage sparked by a small Florida church's plan to burn copies of the Koran on 9/11: "This is how it feels to be judged by the sins of others who destroy in the name of your faith," writes William Saletan. "You aren't responsible for the Koran burners. Don't hold Muslims responsible for 9/11."

With the faltering US economy centre stage, Thomas Cooley on Forbes.com, brings an international perspective to the battle between the camps who advocate austerity or stimulus as means to climb out of recession.

Meanwhile, gruesome details in the UK's Guardian of an alleged "kill team" comprising US soldiers who, the paper says, are accused of blowing up and shooting Afghan civilians at random and collecting their fingers as trophies.

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The only other time we witnessed such an operation was when Potus and Flotus, as the security detail refers to the first couple, came for a teachers' conference. Surely Mr Obama is too busy for that at the moment?

The clock is ticking down with deafening urgency to the mid-term elections which will be held two months from yesterday. The opinion polls spell trouble for the Democrats on just about every level. Commentators have already been dealing with the possibility of a House controlled by the Republicans locking horns with a beleaguered president in the White House.

Optimists point to 1994 as one of many examples when a Democrat (in this case President Clinton) saw his party trounced in the mid-terms only to work out a modus operandi with the GOP and then win re-election.

Pessimists might want to read Michael Gerson's column in today's Washington Post. He points out that history is not about to repeat itself because the likely Republican Speaker of the House, Rep John Boehner - he of the permanent tan - is not as powerful as Newt Gingrich was and Barack Obama is no triangulator in the Clinton mould.

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The clock is ticking thunderously. Two months to go before the voters cast their judgement in the US mid-terms. The polls look appalling for the Democrats and for the president. The sluggish economy is mostly to blame. The here and now is dreadful. History comes along to offer at least some context.

This interesting piece on Slate.com explains the persistently growing gulf between America's haves and have-nots. The dream, it turns out, has long been just that. Little more than reverie funded on easy credit and a property bubble. Real middle incomes have remained mainly stagnant, while the rich have become as rich as Crassus.

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I am not sure what I find more troubling. The offensive intentions of Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainsville, Florida to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of 9/11, or the publicity his ploy has been given by General Petreaus' comments today that the burning will inflame tensions and endanger American lives.

The pastor's micro-church boasts 50 members. He would have been completely ignored had we, the media, not spent the quiet summer months locking horns over the Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero, which has also morphed into a self fulfilling prophecy about the cultural clash of civilizations. I imagine the general was moved to make his comments -and thus add the fuel of publicity- because it had already gone viral on Islamist websites.

One of the tragedies here is that America's Muslim community has started to feel as uneasy as it did after 9/11. This country had always remained admirably aloof from the anti-Muslim prejudice that has flared up in Britain or France. Will that now end?

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The first day of school for all four of my children, and my wife and I are doing school runs in two cars with the timing of a military campaign. In theory. In practice, three million workers and one million kids in the greater Washington area are attempting to do the same.

Suburban streets that have been all but deserted during the long summer are congested. Petite women in vehicles as big as trucks have turned into stock car drivers. It's scary stuff.

The radio informs me that France is plagued by a national strike over pensions reform and that London commuters have been stranded once again by a tube strike.

Suddenly the morning congestion in the District of Columbia seems less bad.

I remember my first national strike in France. Fish squirming on the gilded pavements on the Champs Elysee, dumped there by irate fishermen. Milk flowing down the Rue Faubourg St Honore, courtesy of angry dairy farmers.

The French know how to put on a good strike. I wonder if American workers without the same tradition of labour militancy will ever follow their French comrades?

David Brooks has a very thoughtful piece in today's New York Times about the imperiled state of America's moral materialism in the post excess era.

Will faith and prosperity finally collide? Or can one help people deal with the loss of the other?

It strikes me that America's declining economy is still a vexing question for the individual soul before it becomes an unsettling issue on the collective street.

None of this is reassuring for a president who now has two months exactly to the mid-term elections to persuade a disgruntled electorate that voting in the old lot is a bad idea.

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Are mid-term elections saving the economy? I'm referring not to policy debates but the absurd amounts of cash being dropped on competitive House, Senate and Governor's races. The Associated Press estimates $1.2 billion has been raised by congressional candidates.

According to John Judis though, the recovery depends somewhat on whether we call our economic malaise a recession or a depression.

Pakistan expert Ahmed Rashid argues that the country's unpopular government needs to cede some power if it is to recover from the devastating floods.

Staying with Pakistan, Vanity Fair's Bill Bradley has put together a sobering graphic comparing our collective generosity with the amount we spend on fun.

Craiglist may have shuttered its "adult services" section, but that may not hamper the online sex trade.

And today in bitter irony: a school named after Al Gore may be built on toxic soil.

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A graphical view of President Obama's changing political fortunes -- and a reminder from Gallup that both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton saw major popularity dips in their first terms before going on to win re-election.

Britain's Telegraph newspaper has a story about "a new generation of congressmen" ruffling the feathers of the Republican party hierarchy.

General David Petraeus attacks a Florida church's troubling plan for a "Burn a Koran" day on 11 September, telling the Wall Street Journal it will endanger the lives of US troops.

You may have missed this, but it's worth a read. As the US mission in Iraq changes from Enduring Freedom to Operation New Dawn, Slate.com explains just how the military chooses these names.

Meanwhile, on the BBC News website, writer Michael Goldfarb argues that religious freedom is not same as tolerance.

And finally, only in Britain, a new meaning to the phrase "fast food" -- or "meals on wheels" for that matter.

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And then I make the mistake of opening the newspapers. There is precious little to reflect the climatic cheer. The New York Times has an article about the onerous choice facing the administration during the stubborn housing slump. Let the market crash completely so that reluctant new buyers will at least pile in even if it produces a new wave of foreclosures and deeply depresses the tens of millions of Americans who cling to their property and perceived value as the only hope of recovery.

It gets worse on the inside pages. Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman, never a man who can be relied upon to put a smile on your face, compares 2010 to 1938, when the public lost faith in government intervention (ring a bell?), FDR was too timid (more bells?) and the continuing economic curse was only exorcised by the biggest public spending program in history: World War Two. Feeling queasy?

Then turn to the Washington Post where Pakistan's most eminent journalist Ahmed Rashid has a piece that explains how the severe summer floods could well push his country over the brink. He cites the combination of suffering, blithe aloofness from the corrupt elite and a lack of international aid from a world that doesn't trust the Pakistan.

This brings me back to Labor Day. Unlike European holidays that celebrate the rights of the working man and woman America's holiday was introduced in 1894 by President Cleveland to appease the unions after soldiers and policemen brutally put down a railway strike. It was a gift to the angry masses. Take note President Obama.

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It now seems unlikely that the avuncular sounding Earl will become one of those hurricanes with which Americans will forever be on first name terms like Hugo, Andrew or Katrina? Still, it seems odd that Washington is preparing for a sunny, pristine Labour Day weekend while the storm churns off the East Coast with Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and Cape Cod in its sights.

Luckily Earl has given the Gulf a wide berth but the mood down there is depressed for another reason. Yesterday's explosion of the Vermilion rig may not have spilled blood or crude oil but it did remind rattled residents of the vulnerability of their waters. It is also certain to fuel the battle between the administration which wants to limit off shore drilling ands the oil industry, as well as most residents who rely on its jobs, for a resumption. BP (Remember them?) is now warning that it may not be able to pay back all the cash it owes unless it is allowed to do more drilling in the Gulf, reports the New York Times.

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Just when you thought you had got to grips with the internet, here's the Economist with news that this great unifier is in danger of being torn apart - by three powerful forces.

A report in the Washington Post suggests the White House is considering a new round of tax breaks. Doesn't that have a serious smell of political desperation?

The Israelis and Palestinians aren't the only ones in the spotlight during the Mid-East peace talks. "Is this Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's moment to shine?" asks ABC News.

Finally, from the BBC News website - a Mexican political scientist's take on the reasons behind that country's drug violence, and the prospects for the future.

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Here's a great shot of the five statesmen walking down the red carpet at the White House last night. The three men in the middle are crucial, of course - Netanyahu, Obama and Abbas. But my eye was drawn to the two on either end. King Abdullah of Jordan, on the right, is really short, just like his dad, King Hussein. And considering reports have been leaking out for months that Mubarak is really sick - he looked pretty damned good.

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How the mighty are fallen! More bad news for the president as Time Magazine wonders how Mr Obama became "Mr Unpopular".

Over on FoxNews.com, a psychiatrist pushes back against the narrative that James Lee, who was killed by police after taking hostages at the Discovery Channel building yesterday, was an environmental terrorist.

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It's been one of those days.

On one of the hottest days of the year - shouldn't they be cooling down by now? - the Frei household air conditioning packs up with a death rattle from the vents. Temperature outside this morning: 85 degrees. Inside: 87!

This all started when the local power company switched off the electricity to right a pole that was leaning more perilously than the Tower of Pisa. The power lines droop above our heads like washing lines. Has anyone ever thought of putting them underground like they do in Poland and Estonia, let alone Germany and France?

Seeking relief from my loathing for the Washington swamp climate - this was a hardship posting for British Diplomats until the advent of air-con - I switch on the TV to be reminded of the menacing orange swirl called Earl - oddball name for a deadly hurricane - churning up the East Coast.

And then there's news that another rig has exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.

Enough already!

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