Tiger Woods won’t face reckless driving charges
US golf legend Tiger Woods is recovering in hospital after surgery for serious leg injuries sustained in a car crash that have raised fears for the 45-year-old’s career.
Law enforcement officials said the 15-time major champion, who has been plagued by injury in recent years, would not face reckless driving charges for the crash which didn’t involve any other cars.
Woods was driving alone in a Los Angeles suburb on a road notorious for fatal accidents when his SUV hit the center median, crossed into the opposing lane, struck a tree and then rolled over several times. “A reckless driving charge has a lot of elements into it, this is purely an accident,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva told reporters.
By turning a blind eye to its aggression, the US is only emboldening
Tehran
The Biden administration does not perceive
Iran as a colonizer, only as colonized, which suggests either a lack of historical understanding or flagrant bias
There is a new administration in the White House and a new watchword in US foreign policy: Decolonization. Imperialism, so the reasoning goes, is to blame for all the ills of the world so, to fix it, empires like America must “decolonize.” The US, it is said, must see things from the perspective of smaller foreign powers that it has often been at odds with. Those words might describe the worldview of Robert Malley, the new envoy to Iran (not a universally popular appointment). But if Iran is one of those smaller foreign powers, those in the State Department behind the commitment to decolonize are not only misguided, they are woefully misinformed.
If imperialism equals occupying and bullying neighboring countries, then Iran, for example, has a long history of it. In 1936, Tehran annexed the Arab Kaab emirate in the south and renamed it Khuzestan. In 1971, Iran occupied three Emirati islands.
Yet President Joe Biden, Malley and company don’t perceive Iran as a colonizer, only as colonized, which suggests either a lack of historical understanding or flagrant bias.
In his book “The Call from Algeria,” Malley links the rise of Islamism to the failure of communism in what he calls the Third World. Leaving aside his use of a term that is now deemed offensive, Malley fails to see that Islamism is in fact communism mark
II. Both ideologies use populist rhetoric and sanction violence. Had the Soviet Union not collapsed, Islamism would have remained a fringe movement.
If Biden is persuaded by the decolonization argument, the US will up sticks and leave the Gulf, which is exactly what the mullahs have been dreaming of since 1979. The Iranians have hardly made a secret of their intentions: With the US and its military forces gone, the way would be open for Iran to step in as the dominant power in the region, restructuring security and turning neighboring countries into satellite states.
Iran has often pressed for admission to the Gulf Cooperation Council, which currently comprises Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman. In fact, Iran would like to go further and replace the GCC with something bigger — which would include not only the Gulf but also the Red Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, which sounds more like expansionism than decolonizing.
The Biden administration is dressing up its decolonization policy as the ditching of Donald Trump’s “America First” unilateralism. In reality, the US is being very choosy about just how multilateral it wants to be. Biden rejoined the Paris agreement on climate change on his very first day in office. But the US also plans to revive the nuclear deal with Iran, which would allow Tehran to export more than 2 million barrels of oil a day. How does that square with reducing fossil fuel energy, one of the commitments enshrined in the
Paris agreement?
The Biden team has been selective at the UN too, breaking with multilateral decisions to pursue its own unilateral policy. Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1701 call for all militias in Lebanon to disarm and disband. For “all militias,” read Hezbollah in particular. Yet the White House — especially when occupied by the Democrats — prefers to talk to Hezbollah rather than enforce UN resolutions.
Similarly, on Yemen, the UN Security Council has passed no fewer than nine resolutions imposing an arms embargo, travel ban and asset freeze on any individual or entity connected to the Houthi militia, which is accused of obstructing the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Yet new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has had the Houthis removed from the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations because, he argued, the war in Yemen can only be resolved by talking to the Houthis.
Pursuing decolonization and combating climate change appear to give the US the moral high ground. The reality, however, is that foreign policy is never cut and dried or black and white, but rather a frayed mess of gray areas and compromise.
The Biden administration seems set to put on a show of “fixing” the world by pursuing decolonization — a term it clearly does not fully understand but will still use to put a gloss on the fact that the US, like all governments, has its own agenda. It will embrace multilateralism when it is expedient. It will “see things from the perspective of smaller foreign powers” when it is advantageous.
Under Biden, the US will pick and choose where to dispense its largesse, as all empires do. Impartiality has nothing to do with it.
In a dull and simple way, one could say that the Sahel region is to France what Afghanistan is to the US. There are obviously many differences, but both countries are engaged in a long-term, highcost military campaign fighting Islamic insurgents in an effort to avoid any terrorist actions destabilizing an entire region: Western Africa for France, Central Asia for the US. In both cases, and despite the necessity of the task, these interventions have grown unpopular both domestically and regionally. Also, in both cases, it had seemed until recently that these were undeclared “forever wars,” from which they would never be able to extract themselves without a risk of serious regional political instability, as well as the risk of terrorism in their own country or their sovereign representations worldwide.
Last week, a summit of the leaders of the G5 Sahel (which includes Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad) took place and French President Emmanuel Macron participated via video link. Yet, after more than eight years of military intervention, France — despite declarations of the opposite — would welcome a lighter footprint in the region, counterbalanced by greater engagement from local and international allies.
This comes only a year after France increased its troop level and after many successes on the ground, especially in the sensitive “three borders zone” between Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. These include the successful targeting of high-ranking commanders of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb (AQIM), which represents a direct domestic threat to France. The area is also a fertile ground for Daesh affiliates. This is why France would prefer to focus on counterterrorism tasks, while the G5 Sahel countries take on greater responsibilities. This new approach is, in essence, a move toward the “Sahelization” of the conflict and its solutions. Building on the recent military successes, France wants Sahel countries to enhance their economic, social and political approaches to ending the fertile ground of radicalization that can grow the ranks of the insurgent groups.
This is why it is not a surprise that many French analysts are now encouraging direct discussions with the different insurgents, especially as the situation has worsened and there has been a loss of popular support. The French leadership still publicly opposes such a move. This would, however, be quite like the previous US administration’s negotiations with the Taliban. A negotiated approach will only be successful for France and the US alike if the assessment that these insurgencies are mainly local in their demands and do not have international or expansionist goals is true, and states are able to maintain their full control. For now, as it looks to bring in more international involvement, one can expect French diplomacy to engage with new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in an effort to secure a broader UN mandate and support. The Sahel conflict, like Afghanistan, still demands long-term efforts, but an important question is which countries support, if not encourage, the insurgents in their violent actions. Confronting them should be a priority.