News Abroad

Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad

by Alfred W. McCoy

Photograph of apparent prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, 2004. Credit: Wikipedia.After a decade of fiery public debate and bare-knuckle partisan brawling, the United States has stumbled toward an ad hoc bipartisan compromise over the issue of torture that rests on two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and rendition abroad.

Mahdism (and Sectarianism and Superstition) Rises in the Islamic World

by Timothy R. Furnish

Muslims praying. Credit: Wikipedia

Egypt's Sixty Years of Misery

by Daniel Pipes

This week marks 60 years since Egypt's self-proclaimed Free Officers overthrew the constitutional monarchy of King Farouq – and the first anniversary when one can imagine the demise of the military despotism that so long has wounded the country. Sadly, its most likely replacement will bring on an even worse rule.King Farouk I (r. 1936-52).The era of monarchy had plenty of faults, from iniquitous income levels to violent movements (foremost among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) but it was an era of modernization, of a growing economy, and of increasing influence in the world. Industry had begun, women threw off their face coverings, and Egyptian soft power had a wide impact in Arabic-speaking countries. Tarek Osman recalls this time in his excellent Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak (Yale) as "liberal, glamorous, cosmopolitan."

Unlike Mitt Romney, Most Americans Want to Cut U.S. Military Spending

by Lawrence S. Wittner

USS Ronald Reagan under construction at Newport News, 2000. The approximate cost of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier like the Ronald Reagan is 4.5 billion dollars. Credit: U.S. NavyOn some issues, there is a serious disconnect between candidates for public office and the public they are hoping to represent.Take the case of Mitt Romney and military spending.For some time now, the Republican presidential candidate has been an avid proponent of a vast U.S. military buildup. Last October, in a speech at the Citadel, he promised that he would never “wave the white flag of surrender” but, rather, devote himself to creating “an American Century.” This would be secured, he explained, by a hefty increase in U.S. armaments. In terms of U.S. warships alone, he promised to raise annual production by 67 percent. Attacking President Barack Obama for what he claimed was military weakness, Romney called for increasing the U.S. military budget, in fiscal 2013, by 17 percent. Indeed, he has proposed raising U.S. military spending by as much as $2 trillion over the next decade.

Channelling George Washington: The End of China's New Class

by Thomas Fleming

Milovan Djilas“I just talked to a ghost who’s haunting China.”“Does he, she, or it have a name?”“Milovan Djilas. He wrote a book that played a crucial role in destroying the Soviet Union -- The New Class. I think it will eventually do the same thing to the People's Republic of China.”“Fascinating stuff. Please tell us more.”“No doubt you’ve read about the huge scandal surrounding the corrupt rule of the of the Chinese provincial boss, Bo Xilai, and his even more corrupt wife -- including the murder of the British businessman, Neil Heywood. The whole world is now aware that what Djilas wrote about the Soviet Union -- the blather about revolutionary heroism -- was a cover for a new ruling class to seize power and exploit and dominate the people more ruthlessly than the capitalists ever dreamt of doing.” “When did Djilas write this book?”

The Road to Damascus

by Daniel Martin Varisco

What a modern day Saul might hope to seeAbout 2000 years ago a zealot named Saul witnessed a blinding light on the road to Damascus; it was both a name changing and life changing experience. The great epistle writer and first missionary went on to create early Christianity, at least in the canonical sense. There are more blinding, life-and-death lights now ablaze on the road to Damascus as well as in Damascus. This time no one would mistake them for signs of the divine. While the world watched as the Egyptian people elected a leader with religious convictions, the last entrenched dictator (sparing the kings and emirs who still live as though the 1001 Nights never ended) to the north is spilling the blood of his own people. Asad, the dentist turned family potentate, is more like a modern-day Nero than a latter-day hero. His siege mentality, propped up by Russian economic and political interests, is not viable in the long run, but how long can Syrians survive the short run?

Our Drone Planet: Interview with Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse on the Past, Present, and Future of Drones

by David Austin Walsh

Tom Engelhardt is the founder of TomDispatch.com, which has been one of the web's premier sources for critical commentary and news on the War on Terror since 2001. Formerly an editor for the Pacific News Service and senior editor at Pantheon Books, he is the author of numerous books on U.S. foreign policy, including The United States of Fear and The End of Victory Culture.

The Senate Needs to Rein in Brutal Prison Practices

by Jeremy Kuzmarov

The Senate investigations committee hearings on solitary confinement practices headed by Dick Durbin (D-IL) has focused badly needed attention on the crisis associated with the American criminal justice system. Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, law-and-order hawks have worked to undermine many of the innovative correctional reforms developed during the previous era of prisoner rights mobilization, abandoning the goal of rehabilitation. While railing against social welfare programs and excessive government spending, these moral hypocrites have presided over an unprecedented prison boom funded by taxpayer dollars, and allowed prison conditions to deteriorate significantly in many states, introducing draconian innovations such as the Supermax facility where inmates are locked up 23 hours a day and deprived the most basic of human contact.

Being a Great Power is Just a State of Mind

by Michael J. Turner

The United Kingdom, partially as a continued consequence of the global financial meltdown and the subsequent austerity measures, now faces some of its most severe defense cuts in nearly a generation. Predictably, Prime Minister David Cameron has insisted that cuts in spending would not reduce Britain’s international influence. Opinions differ about this, and the Secretary of State for Defense at the time, Liam Fox, went public with his own misgivings about “draconian” measures that could have “grave consequences.” Washington was also unhappy: U.S.

A Liberal Challenge to Wahhabist Orthodoxy May Be the Way Forward for Islam

by Judith Mendelsohn Rood

The Kaaba in Mecca at night. Credit: WikipediaNinety years after the abolition of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the League of Nations Mandate in Palestine in 1922, Hassan al-Banna and his political ally, Hajj Amin al-Hussayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, have won their greatest political victory: the presidency of Egypt. Despite the efforts of the opposition to keep Egypt from becoming Salafist, the authoritarian tyranny that was the Mubarak regime has been thoroughly repudiated by the Egyptian masses. As in Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood’s moral standing has proven lethal to Arab nationalism. The consequences for Muslim conservatives, liberals, Christians and women there have already been felt in Gaza, where Hamas has used its popularity to wage jihad against Israel and those whose presence is not welcome in Salafi society.

Egypt: An Election within a Coup within a Coup

by Juan Cole

Arab satellite television is showing lines of Egyptian voters at polling stations on Saturday, as some proportion of the 50 million eligible voters makes a decision between a former air force general and a leader of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. The military has spread 150,000 troops through the country to safeguard some 13,000 polling stations.

Stay Out of the Syrian Morass

by Daniel Pipes

As the Syrian government makes increasingly desperate and vicious efforts to keep power, pleas for military intervention, more or less on the Libyan model, have become more insistent. This course is morally attractive, to be sure. But should Western states follow this counsel? I believe not.Those calls to action fall into three main categories: a Sunni Muslim concern for co-religionists, a universal humanitarian concern to stop torture and murder, and a geopolitical worry about the impact of the ongoing conflict. The first two motives can be fairly easily dispatched. If Sunni governments -- notably those of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar -- choose to intervene on behalf of fellow Sunnis against Alawis, that is their prerogative but Western states have no dog in this fight.Who was responsible for the massacre in Houla, Syria, on May 25-26? Shown here: a mass funeral of victims.

The Justice Cascade: Political Scientist Dr. Kathryn Sikkink on Human Rights Prosecutions

by Robin Lindley

In May 2012, the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Hague sentenced former Liberian president Charles G. Taylor to 50 years in prison for atrocities and of aiding and abetting war crimes committed in Sierra Leone in the 1990s including murder, rape, sexual slavery and horrific mutilation, all in exchange for blood diamonds. In this landmark case for human rights law, Taylor became the first former head of state convicted by an international tribunal since the Nuremberg trials in Germany after World War II.Then in June 2012, an Egyptian court sentenced ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his former interior minister, Habib el-Adly, to life in prison for failing to stop the killing of unarmed demonstrators during the protests that ended Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule.

Coca-Cola Profits Off Egyptian Jew's Seized Property

by Edwin Black

For 15 years, Egyptian-Jewish businessman Refael Bigio has been battling a goliath corporate adversary, The Coca-Cola Company. Bigio charges that Coke has been profiting from his family's stolen property just outside Cairo. The Bigio family's property was expropriated by Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser in the mid-1960s during one of Egypt's anti-Jewish purges. Over the course of a decade and a half, The Coca-Cola Company has steadfastly refused to bargain in good faith or to negotiate any fair compensation for the expropriated property, according to Bigio's lawyers. In the company's defense, Coke's attorneys have defended Egypt's anti-Jewish seizures and incidentally those of Hitler's Germany as confiscations that "did not violate international law." (see Bigio v. Coca-Cola, et al., No. 97-CV-02858, Document 63)

Vietnam is Back in Town

by Jerry Lembcke

Just as perennial announcements that “Freud is dead” or “God is dead” signal that they're anything but, the recurring claims that America is over and done with the war in Vietnam are just as certainly premature.The aftershocks of the military defeat in Vietnam reverberated through the country’s economic, political, and cultural institutions well into the 1980s. By the end of the century, though, the past-tensing of the war became common. The roll-back of Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in 1991 prompted President George H.W. Bush to declare the so-called Vietnam Syndrome “kicked,” the hangover inhibiting the national will for more war cured. When President Bill Clinton established diplomatic relations with the former enemy regime in Hanoi in 1995, the July 12 Chicago Tribune announced: “The War in Vietnam is over.”

Putin's Russia is Far More Complicated than a Mere Autocracy

by Mark D. Steinberg

Now that Vladimir Putin is once again considered a dictatorial menace to the Western world, it's worth remembering that he was the subject of vicious mockery within Russia as recently as 2012.

Do Nuclear Weapons Really Deter Aggression?

by Lawrence S. Wittner

It’s often said that nuclear weapons have protected nations from military attack.But is there any solid evidence to bolster this contention? Without such evidence, the argument that nuclear weapons prevented something that never occurred is simply a counter-factual abstraction that cannot be proved.

Count Palestine Refugees?

by Daniel Pipes

The fetid, dark heart of the Arab war on Israel, I have long argued, lies not in disputes over Jerusalem, checkpoints, or "settlements." Rather, it concerns the so-called Palestine refugees.So called because of the nearly 5 million official refugees served by UNRWA (short for the "United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East"), only about 1 percent are real refugees who fit the agency's definition of "people whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict." The other 99 percent are descendants of those refugees, or what I call fake refugees.Perversely, UNRWA feted its 60th anniversary in 2009, as though this were something to be proud of.

Were the Bailouts Necessary? Look to Europe for the Answers

by Robert Brent Toplin

Conservatives in the United States often criticize the federal government’s “bailouts” of large financial institutions during the crash of 2008-2009, yet recent evidence from Europe shows what can happen when ailing banks and businesses are not quickly rescued. The Europeans took what President Barack Obama calls an “incremental” approach to the financial crisis, responding in bits and pieces when specific troubles emerged. In contrast, leaders in the United States acted decisively during the financial meltdown a few years ago. Federal bailouts quickly put American businesses on stronger footing.Over the past two years American officials have been urging the Europeans to come up with bold measures, much like leaders in Washington did when Wall Street had a meltdown. During that emergency, George W. Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, Jr. and Barack Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, found ways to pump money into troubled firms. Their recommendations sparked angry debates in Congress, but politicians ultimately backed the recommendations. Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve aided those efforts by injecting liquidity into the financial system.

SOCOM Unleashed: Globalizing the Global War on Terror

by Andrew J. Bacevich

As he campaigns for reelection, President Obama periodically reminds audiences of his success in terminating the deeply unpopular Iraq War. With fingers crossed for luck, he vows to do the same with the equally unpopular war in Afghanistan. If not exactly a peacemaker, our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president can (with some justification) at least claim credit for being a war-ender.Yet when it comes to military policy, the Obama administration’s success in shutting down wars conducted in plain sight tells only half the story, and the lesser half at that. More significant has been this president’s enthusiasm for instigating or expanding secret wars, those conducted out of sight and by commandos.