Iran s Rattling Saber

Saber Mohamad Abu Assi

Saber shone, blood flowed.

His saber was a toy.

Look at the saber, see?

It's a green saber of light.

I still got my saber, Reverend.

Is this your saber or yours?

I'm getting married to my saber!

It was during the ice age that the saber toothed tiger became extinct.

I was just gonna ask Uncle Ethan what he's gonna do with his saber.

That the Commander tore off my epaulets and broke my saber in front of the whole regiment?

A Cossack is a man on a horse with a fur cap on his head and a saber in his hand.

He would shoot his light saber across the abyss, making a blade of light, and then scamper across on this blade of light.

Some of you may remember Star Wars Kid, the poor teenager who filmed himself with a golf ball retriever, acting as if it were a light saber.

Egypt s new Islamist leaders may want to restore full sovereignty over the peninsula, as President Mohamed Morsi s legal adviser, Mohamed Fouad Gadalla, recently noted. Such saber rattling comments vis à vis Israel are currently popular in the country.

Indeed, fearing the popularity of Lee Teng hui, who ran in the 1996 presidential election on a pro independence platform, China s People s Liberation Army actually fired missiles close to the nearby coast of Keelung. But this saber rattling backfired.

BERLIN The world s task in addressing North Korea s saber rattling is made no easier by the fact that it confronts an impoverished and effectively defeated country. On the contrary, it is in such circumstances that calm foresight is most necessary.

Israel s reluctance to rattle its nuclear saber, even in dire circumstances, adds to the mystery. In the Yom Kippur War, as Syrian forces threatened to break the country s defensive lines, Israeli decision makers recoiled even from threatening to use nuclear weapons.

And together they submitted a design based on Lord Foster's vision, which was he remembered as a kid reading Flash Gordon comic books, and he said that when Flash Gordon would come to an abyss, he would shoot what today would be a kind of a light saber.

The World Bank Group and its private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), are trying to harness this potential to support national education systems. A recently launched initiative, called the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER), collects and shares comparative data on educational policies and institutions from countries around the world.

Colombia s new president, Juan Manuel Santos, showed genuine courage in cutting short a march to war with Venezuela and calming down the entire Bolivarian axis (Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia) by reviving the region s diplomatic channels. His was a truly revolutionary shift from the politics of saber rattling to the hard work of establishing regional peace.

The preliminary findings of an assessment made by the Sistema Saber de Evaluación de la Educación and the Colombian Institute for the Promotion of Higher Education (ICFES), which assessed the academic achievement of students of both sexes in the seventh and ninth grades of both the academic timetables, indicate a better overall performance by boys.

As long as Russia remains intent on achieving unacceptable outcomes, accompanied by hints of nuclear saber rattling, reaching a compromise will be difficult. Putin is far from an ideal partner with whom to attempt to reconcile the two key principles of international law the right of a people to self determination and the sanctity of national borders.

But, after a year of economic sanctions and negotiations with no result, Israel s patience on what it regards as an existential issue is wearing thin. Even short of an actual military conflict which could double oil prices overnight the resumption of saber rattling by Israel and the war of words between the two sides could lead to a sharp rise in energy costs.

Because the biggest share of the US trade gap is with China, a country vilified as a currency manipulating cheater, the bilateral trade deficit has become the lightening rod for China bashers. It is what has driven Obama to go to the mat with China on recent disputes within the World Trade Organization and on restrictions on Chinese investment in Oregon wind farms, and what has led to saber rattling by Romney on currency manipulation and trade sanctions.