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 Gwynne Dyer

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Gwynne Dyer
Gwynne Dyer has worked as a journalist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years; his articles are published in 45 countries. His book, "Climate Wars," deals with the geopolitical implications of climate change and has been translated into Japanese, French, Russian, Chinese and a number of other languages.
COMMENTARY
Feb 16, 2011
Good sense of the Arabs
They wouldn't do it for al-Qaida, but they finally did it for themselves.
COMMENTARY
Feb 11, 2011
Israel's post-Mubarak fear
LONDON — In his first public comment on the unfolding drama in Egypt, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, worried aloud last week that the right analogy may be the Iranian revolution of 1979: "Our real fear is of a situation . . . which has already developed in several countries including...
COMMENTARY
Feb 5, 2011
The Arab world's '1989'?
LONDON — It was the Egyptian Army's statement that brought it all back: "To the great people of Egypt, your armed forces, acknowledging the legitimate rights of the people . . . have not and will not use force against the Egyptian people." In other words, go ahead and overthrow President Hosni Mubarak....
COMMENTARY
Jan 30, 2011
Vietnam delusion endures
LONDON — Communist party congresses are generally tedious events, and the 11th Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party (Jan. 12-17) was no exception. The changes in personnel at the top were decided by the elite inner circle of the party long before the congress opened, and the rhetoric was in the...
COMMENTARY
Jan 27, 2011
The nature of the next Mideast war
LONDON — The release by the Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera of 16,000 leaked Palestinian documents covering the past 10 years of peace negotiations has driven a stake through the heart of the already moribund "peace process."
COMMENTARY
Jan 26, 2011
Why did Duvalier return to Haiti?
LONDON — A confidential 2006 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, made public by WikiLeaks, said the United States viewed the possible return of either of the two exiled Haitian ex-presidents, Jean-Bertrand Aristide or Jean-Claude Duvalier, as "unhelpful." But one of them, former president-for-life...
COMMENTARY
Jan 9, 2011
The vanishing two-state solution
LONDON — What does it mean when the United States, Britain, France and Spain upgrade the diplomatic status of the Palestinian delegations in their capitals, as they all did in the past year? When the number of countries recognizing Palestinian statehood now exceeds 100?
COMMENTARY
Jan 6, 2011
Crisis shows African Union's limits
LONDON — "It's not a bluff," said an adviser to Alassane Ouattara, the real winner in November's presidential election in Ivory Coast, who is now besieged in a hotel in Abidjan, the capital, under United Nations protection. "The (African Union) soldiers are coming much faster than anyone thinks." But...
COMMENTARY
Dec 22, 2010
U.S. trapped in a civil war
LONDON — U.S. President Barack Obama seems to be working under a serious misapprehension. Releasing the White House's annual strategic review to the public on Dec. 16, he declared that U.S. policy in Afghanistan was "on track" to defeat al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Who told him that the United States is...
COMMENTARY
Dec 15, 2010
The accusations against Julian Assange
LONDON — The U.S. government is doing all it can to silence the WikiLeaks organization, including starving it of funds by getting PayPal, Visa and MasterCard to freeze its accounts. But has it also persuaded the Swedes to accuse Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, of raping two women, in order to...
COMMENTARY
Dec 12, 2010
Preparing the ground for the Egyptian heir
LONDON — Egyptian elections are always highly predictable affairs, but the second round of this year's parliamentary elections on Dec. 5, was completely pointless. The first round on Nov. 28 showed that the regime was going to suppress even the marginal role permitted to prodemocracy parties in previous...
COMMENTARY
Dec 9, 2010
No emissions deal at Cancun
LONDON — The U.N. climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, is nearing its end, and while the ending will not be as rancorous as last year's train wreck in Copenhagen, there will be no global deal on cutting greenhouse gas emissions this year either. However, there is some hope for the longer run.
COMMENTARY
Dec 3, 2010
Penny for your WikiLeak
LONDON — The U.S. government, faced with the publication on the Internet of a quarter-million cables sent by U.S. embassies in recent years, has responded just as it did when WikiLeaks posted similar troves of secret messages about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the web earlier this year. It has...
COMMENTARY
Nov 18, 2010
Release of Suu Kyi is no 'Mandela moment'
People love historical analogies, so it's easy to think of Aung San Suu Kyi's release from house arrest Nov. 13 as Burma's "Mandela moment." When Nelson Mandela was freed from 27 years of imprisonment in 1990, it marked the start of a process that saw the negotiated end of the apartheid regime and genuinely...
COMMENTARY
Nov 4, 2010
Biodiversity and small mercies
Sometimes we have to be grateful for small mercies. The deal on biodiversity that more than 190 countries agreed to in Nagoya last Friday was, as these things usually are, "a day late and a dollar short," but it's a lot better than nothing. It's even better than most people expected.
COMMENTARY
Oct 31, 2010
The West's Mideast obsession
LONDON — The media in the Middle East carry a lot of Middle Eastern stories, of course, but why do most of the other media in the world do the same?
COMMENTARY
Oct 27, 2010
Brace for the race to put bases on the moon
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) has just released the full data on last year's mission to find out whether there are usable amounts of water on the moon, and the news is good. There is plenty of frozen water on the moon, plus frozen gases like methane, oxygen and hydrogen that would...
COMMENTARY
Oct 14, 2010
Netanyahu is a deal-breaker, not a racist
"With this law Israel buys an exit ticket from the family of nations," wrote Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea last week in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. "The proposed loyalty law . . . is really racist. It obliges non-Jews to declare that they would be loyal to the Jewish state but exempts Jews from...
COMMENTARY
Oct 10, 2010
Less tolerance forecast in the Netherlands?
LONDON — If Gert Wilders were some underemployed bigot ranting in a pub, you'd just move away from him. He calls the Islamic veil a "head rag" and says it should be taxed for "polluting" the Dutch landscape. He condemns Islam as "the sick ideology of Allah and Mohammed" and the Quran as "the Mein Kampf...
COMMENTARY
Oct 6, 2010
Pirates and private navies
The good news is that something is finally going to be done about the pirates who infest the Somali coast and raid far out into the Indian Ocean. A group of London-based insurance companies led by the Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group (JLT) is planning to create a private navy to protect commercial shipping...

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