BRITAIN

BRITAIN
The Independent, London, Dec. 3: According to the Foreign Office dossier, Saddam Hussein: crimes and human rights abuses, "Iraq is a terrifying place to live." It certainly is, and even the most vociferous anti-war campaigner would have to agree that Saddam heads a brutal, cruel, murderous regime.
There is something vaguely pornographic about the government's little compendium of sadism, with its graphic, stomach-turning descriptions of eye gouging, acid baths and electric drills. But there is no reason to doubt that these things are commonplace in Baathist Iraq, and that the Iraqi people, the Middle East and the world generally would be happier and safer without Saddam. Why then, one is forced to ask, did the British and American governments show such enthusiasm for supporting and arming this monster during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s?
Not realpolitik
It is not an adequate response to plead the realpolitik that the Iranian ayatollahs were a more potent threat to Western interests, or that, if we did not arm him, others would (the defence mounted by the late Alan Clark during the Arms-to-Iraq scandal). For Saddam used the very weapons that the West supplied to him to annex Kuwait, an outcome infinitely worse than anything the CIA imagined the Iranians were about to visit upon the region. The neglect of Iraq, and indeed of Afghanistan, of East Timor and countless other obscure territories, until they became a nuisance, are not just scars on our national conscience, but, on a long-term view, entirely inimical to our national interests. This dossier should remind us of that salient fact.
GERMANY
Suddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, Dec. 3: The presidents of China and Russia frequently meet to reassure themselves of their countries' geopolitical significance.
They always do this with a glance toward their absent fellow player at the table of global powers. But the United States ... does not consider itself in the same league as the other two.
America has long pulled ahead and at most regards China as a strategic rival in the future.
The true significance of these two regional giants is the result of a pressing problem on their periphery -- North Korea and its nuclear arms.
With his nuclear program, the erratic dictator Kim (Jong Il) is not just provoking the United States, which regards itself as a force for order in the Pacific.
Kim is shaking up the balance of power in the whole of East Asia -- and so also the balance between China and Russia.
Atomic weapons
If Japan decided to protect itself from the North Korean threat with atomic weapons, the consequences for a region that is short on security agreements would be hard to calculate.
Jiang and Putin have not shied away from using clear words ... but it would be more credible if they pressed along with the United States for North Korea to disarm.
ISRAEL
Ha'aretz, Tel-Aviv, Dec. 2: During a United Nations General Assembly debate last week on the Palestine issue, Israel's ambassador to the U.N., Dr. Yehuda Lancry, said Israel accepts the vision of two states living side by side in peace and security. During the weekend, Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon told a gathering of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that "at the end of the day, most of the settlements will be evacuated."
A short while after Lancry's statement was reported, the prime minister's office issued a statement saying Lancry's statement had nothing to do with Ariel Sharon. The report about the chief of staff's remarks regarding evacuation of the settlements was accompanied by Ya'alon's own denials and reservations expressed by the political echelon.
Ambiguity
The troubling question is whether for a brief moment, the curtain of ambiguity was not lifted and suddenly, for a moment, the truth peeked out. And that truth is that the prime minister and the policymakers recognize the fact that the struggle for a Palestinian state and the question of the future of the settlements has already in effect been settled.