since india demonstrated its bomb in 1998, the chinese have been increasingly uneasy. china reacted to the detonation with angry demands that the international community keep india contained. when that got nowhere, china helped ppakistan go nuclear. in retrospect, that was a scary, destabilizing misstep. but now india and china are poised to continue their rivalry on safer high ground - beyond earth's atmosphere.
nuclear india versus nuclear china is kennedy versus kruschev, and reagan versus gorbachev, all over again. now, as then, a space race is a sexy alternative to nuclear annihilation. [.....]
a decade after the end of the cold war, good old-fashioned space programs still matter. not for exploration's sake, but to settle new cold wars. if you doubt it, imagine this scenario: it's 2029, and a lunar mission lands at tranquillity base. a crew of heroic young indians - or chinese - quietly folds and puts away america's 60-year-old flag. if the world saw that on television, wouldn't the gesture be worth tens of billions of rupees or yuan? of course it would.

said was my first minder, in the wake of the second gulf war in 1991. a man of few words who never smiled, said was so self-effacing that i sometimes forgot he was there. but at the end of my stay in iraq, he insisted on accompanying me for the five-hour drive to the jordanian border. in those days, the highway was safe at night, so it was possible to avoid the scorching daytime heat.
once the lights of baghdad were behind us, said began talking in the dark.
he was confident the driver understood no english and sitting in front of me, so that i saw only the back of his head, said delivered a terrible indictment of the regime. he'd been drafted into the army during the first (iran- iraq) gulf war, in which his brother was killed.
"we lived for months at a time in the desert, on the verge of starvation. the wolves circled around us at night . . . that's how i spent my youth . . . i hate that man," he said of saddam hussein.
"i want only one thing; to see him die before i do." said was never again assigned to me, but there was a flicker of complicity in his eyes when i came across him on later visits.
neither of us ever alluded to that conversation on the highway to jordan. he now works for a major european television network and for the first time, in the days following the fall of the regime, i saw him smile.

riad, my final minder under the ancien r�gime was by far the most unpleasant [.........] riad's behaviour on the morning of april 9th enraged me. [.........]
us forces were about to take over the capital and there were running gun battles and artillery bombardments through much of the city. riad tried to drive me into a no man's land on haifa street, with barricades at one end and us tanks hulking menacingly at the other, because he wanted to take bread to his sister.
he went into a sulk when i insisted that he turn round. at saddam medical city, i found some of the most terrible scenes of the war. burned, disfigured, bleeding and dying men were lined up in the hospital foyer. an orderly pushed a sponge mop through pools of blood on the floor.
in the midst of this, as us tanks opened fire on the iraqi armour that had been cynically hidden on the grounds, riad asked the hospital's heroic director to take his blood pressure. dr khaldoun brahim, a surgeon, had barely slept in a week. his house was destroyed in the bombing and he did not know where his wife and children were.
under bombardment, surrounded by suffering on an epic scale, riad the egocentric mokhabarat minder asked to have his blood pressure checked.
"it's a little high," the unflappable dr brahim said as riad rolled his sleeve down, with the sang-froid born of many encounters with obnoxious secret policemen. "it's the stress, isn't it doctor?" riad responded.
it was a relief to see him decamp at high speed an hour later, as a us armoured column advanced on east baghdad.

"in december 1987, at the peak of concern over international terrorism, the un general addembly passed its major resolution on the matter, condemning the plague in the strongest terms and calling on all nations to act forcefully to overcome it. the resolution passed 153- 2 (american and isreal being the 2 objectors), honduras alone abtaining"