I have posted many articles on the issue of the purported decline of American power in world affairs. The issue is complex, and defies easy categorization. Chen Jimin is an Assistant Research Fellow for the Institute for International and Strategic Studies at the Party School of the Central Committee of C.P.C. and has written a short essay on American exceptionalism. The argument parallels many posited by American analysts, and reflects a belief that the loss of power is largely domestic and internal.
Ahmed Chalabi, former head of the Iraqi National Congress, is positioning himself to replace Nouri al-Maliki as the leader of Iraq. The Iraq National Congress was an organization largely created and funded by the US as an alternative to Saddam Hussein after the Persian Gulf War of 1991. He was actually flown to Iraq after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to replace Hussein, but the inability to find weapons of mass destruction deprived the US of the ability to install a new Iraqi leader–the US had to argue that it instead had intervened to establish democracy in Iraq which required elections. The current instability in Iraq offers Chalabi a second chance to serve as an American surrogate in Iraq.
Global poverty is an incredibly elusive phenomenon to measure. Most indicators stress levels of income, and some measure human development indicators such as life expectancy. By these measures, the usual estimate is that there are about 1.2 billion who live in absolute poverty. A new measure, however, called the Multidimensional Poverty Index, has been developed, and this new measure indicates that the old figure is about 1.6 billion, an error of about 400,000 people. The MPI measures different kinds of deprivations experienced by the poor, and develops a more nuanced, composite picture of what it means to be poor.
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