News Abroad

How to Forget on Memorial Day

by Tom Engelhardt

It’s the saddest reading around: the little announcements that dribble out of the Pentagon every day or two -- those terse, relatively uninformative death notices: rank; name; age; small town, suburb, or second-level city of origin; means of death (“small arms fire,” “improvised explosive device,” “the result of gunshot wounds inflicted by an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform,” or sometimes something vaguer like “while conducting combat operations,” “supporting Operation Enduring Freedom,” or simply no explanation at all); and the unit the dead soldier belonged to. They are seldom 100 words, even with the usual opening line: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Sometimes they include more than one death.

Thou Shalt Not Leak

by Murray Polner

In early 2012 at a White House press briefing ABC’s Jake Tapper asked why the U.S. applauded courageous reporting overseas but did the reverse at home. “How, does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the U.S. by using the Espionage Act to take whistle blowers to court?" The administration, he added, thinks “the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here.”

Should NATO Be Handling World Security?

by Lawrence S. Wittner

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (better known as NATO) is in the news once again thanks to a NATO summit meeting in Chicago over the weekend of May 19-20 and to large public demonstrations in Chicago against this military pact.NATO’s website defines the alliance’s mission as “Peace and Security,” and shows two children lying in the grass, accompanied by a bird, a flower and the happy twittering of birds. There is no mention of the fact that NATO is the world’s most powerful military pact, or that NATO nations account for 70 percent of the world’s annual $1.74 trillion in military spending.The organizers of the demonstrations, put together by peace and social justice groups, assailed NATO for bogging the world down in endless war and for diverting vast resources to militarism. According to a spokesperson for one of the protest groups, Peace Action: “It’s time to retire NATO and form a new alliance to address unemployment, hunger, and climate change.”

2012's Real Victory Won't Be Obama or Romney: It'll Be the National Security State

by William J. Astore

Now that Mitt Romney is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, the media is already handicapping the presidential election big time, and the neck-and-neck opinion polls are pouring in.  But whether President Obama gets his second term or Romney enters the Oval Office, there’s a third candidate no one’s paying much attention to, and that candidate is guaranteed to be the one clear winner of election 2012: the U.S. military and our ever-surging national security state.The reasons are easy enough to explain.  Despite his record as a “warrior-president,” despite the breathless “Obama got Osama” campaign boosterism, common inside-the-Beltway wisdom has it that the president has backed himself into a national security corner.  He must continue to appear strong and uncompromising on defense or else he’ll get the usual Democrat-as-war-wimp label tattooed on his arm by the Republicans.

America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill

by Tom Engelhardt

Here’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands.  No need to constantly look over their shoulders.Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could create a living nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they lead to measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in which bad things are (with rare and understandable exceptions) done only to truly terrible types.  In the process, you simply couldn’t be better protected.And in case you were wondering, there is no question who among us are the best, most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and judicious people: the officials of our national security state.  Trust them implicitly.  They will never give you a bum steer.

Mother's Day, 2012, and We're Still at War

by Murray Polner

After the carnage of World War II, the members of the now defunct Victory Chapter of American Gold Star Mothers in St. Petersburg, Florida, knew better than most what is was like to lose their sons, daughters and husbands in war. “We’d rather not talk about it,” said Ceil Rindfuss, whose son was killed in that conflict. She told the St. Petersburg Times in 1960, “It’s a terrible scar that never heals. We hope there will never be another war so no other mothers will have to go through this ordeal.” But as a result of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, too many now mourn family members lost to war.

Why Did the "Jewish Daily Forward" Interview a Hamas Spokesman?

by Daniel Mandel

The recent interview accorded to Hamas’s Mousa Abu Marzook by the Jewish Daily Forward underscores an all-too-frequent and serious failure of perception when dealing with totalitarian movements and those who speak for them.The problem is not the totalitarian addiction to falsehood. One need not be a totalitarian thug in order to lie. Rather, the problem is the cluelessness as to the purpose of their utterances, not all of which may even be lies.Totalitarians do not speak simply to mislead the credulous or to defame their enemies. That is a subsidiary goal -- and benefit -- of their words. Their words, which form part of their overall offensive, are designed to bewilder and paralyze their enemies.

Protests Over Housing Inequality Have a Long History in Israel

by Yfaat Weiss

The summer of 2011 in Israel was marked by social protest that drew hundreds of thousands of Israelis onto the streets and squares. They were protesting against the government’s ongoing policy of ignoring economic and social hardship, against the deterioration of public state services in the areas of education and health, and in particular against the severe shortage of affordable housing experienced by Israel’s middle and lower classes.

On Islam, Romney Doesn't Have the Slightest Idea What He's Talking About

by Juan Cole

Mitt Romney said Monday that of course he would have taken out Osama bin Laden and that "even Jimmy Carter would have made that call."Since Jimmy Carter ordered a brave and risky but failed military mission into Iran, that was a cheap shot on the part of someone who has never had anything to do with the military. Moreover, Jimmy Carter made peace between Egypt and Israel and played a major role in reducing the number of Africans stricken by the Guinea worm from 3.5 million to 1,100. So Romney, who has mainly been sending our jobs overseas, isn’t good enough to shine Carter’s shoes.

The Real War on Muslim Women

by Daniel Martin Varisco

One of the most revered journals on the political front has taken a cue from Sports Illustrated: Foreign Policy now has a sex issue, indeed what is billed as “the sex issue.” Someone forgot to tell the editors that there is such a thing as “gender,” since there is very little bedroom-variety “sex” revealed in the articles. If a review of “Women in Politics” is about “sex,” then the journal misses out on the real sex going on, like politician John Edwards cavorting while running for President and several secret servicemen strip clubbing the night away in Columbia. And if what is going on from India to Iran is “the new politics of sex,” it looks a lot like the old. The reader might even accuse the journal of false advertising, since the seductive pose of a model clad in hijab black on the cover suggests more politically incorrect eye candy inside.

Fantasies of Male Chivalry Ignore the History of Women in Wartime

by Heather Marie Stur

No American institution subscribes more to heroic notions of masculinity than the armed forces.  The starkest example of this in the last decade was the Jessica Lynch saga. The Army and the media overlooked the fact that another (black) woman was taken prisoner with Lynch, while a third woman was killed outright during the ambush where they were captured. What was important to the Army, the media, and the American public was that U.S. special forces, exclusively comprised of male troops, rescued a young, white, American woman who was held captive by enemy Iraqis.

Civilian Casualties: Tactical Regrets and Strategic Hypocrisy

by Steven I. Levine and Michael H. Hunt

The recent publication by the Los Angeles Times of photographs from 2010 showing grinning American soldiers in Afghanistan posing with the severed limbs of Taliban suicide bombers has provoked more expressions of regret and condemnation by top Washington officials. Just one month ago the cold-blooded murder of sixteen Afghan civilians near Kandahar by an apparently deranged U.S. Army staff sergeant triggered a similar outpouring of shock, regrets, and apologies by top U.S. officials. President Barack Obama declared, “The killing of civilians is outrageous and it’s unacceptable. It’s not who we are as a country, and it does not represent our military.” It would be comforting to be able to believe this, but current military practice and historical facts deny us such moral balm.

The Shame of Nations: A New Record is Set for Spending on War

by Lawrence S. Wittner

On April 17, 2012, as millions of Americans were filing their income tax returns, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. In case Americans were wondering where most of their tax money -- and the tax money of other nations -- went in the previous year, the answer from SIPRI was clear: to war and preparations for war.World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011 -- an increase of $138 billion over the previous year.  The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion.Some news reports have emphasized that, from the standpoint of reducing reliance on armed might, this actually represents progress.  After all, the increase in “real” global military spending -- that is, expenditures after corrections for inflation and exchange rates -- was only 0.3 percent. And this contrasts with substantially larger increases in the preceding thirteen years. 

What History Should Teach Us About Blockading Iran

by Juan Cole

It’s a policy fierce enough to cause great suffering among Iranians -- and possibly in the long run among Americans, too. It might, in the end, even deeply harm the global economy and yet, history tells us, it will fail on its own. Economic war led by Washington (and encouraged by Israel) will not take down the Iranian government or bring it to the bargaining table on its knees ready to surrender its nuclear program. It might, however, lead to actual armed conflict with incalculable consequences.The United States is already effectively embroiled in an economic war against Iran. The Obama administration has subjected the Islamic Republic to the most crippling economic sanctions applied to any country since Iraq was reduced to fourth-world status in the 1990s. And worse is on the horizon.  A financial blockade is being imposed that seeks to prevent Tehran from selling petroleum, its most valuable commodity, as a way of dissuading the regime from pursuing its nuclear enrichment program. 

Vietnam Has Left Town, Say Hello to the New Syndrome on the Block

by Tom Engelhardt

Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history.  Last words -- both eulogies and curses -- have been offered too many times to mention, and yet no American administration found the silver bullet that would put that war away for keeps.Richard Nixon tried to get rid of it while it was still going on by “Vietnamizing” it. Seven years after it ended, Ronald Reagan tried to praise it into the dustbin of history, hailing it as “a noble cause.” Instead, it morphed from a defeat in the imperium into a “syndrome,” an unhealthy aversion to war-making believed to afflict the American people to their core.

South Sudan Could Learn From America's War of 1812 on How to Build a Lasting Peace

by William Lambers

At a Senate hearing in March, actor and Sudan activist George Clooney was asked about how to keep Americans, especially young Americans, engaged with the conflict and hunger in South Sudan. Can people here in the U.S. feel a sustained connection to a country many thousands of miles away?Imagine for a moment a country that has recently gained its independence. War, territorial and boundary disputes, and the inability of the young government to cope with emergencies are the tragic reality. Cities and towns have come under assault from the nation's northern neighbor, forcing civilians to flee their homes in terror. Farmers have been forced away from their land by armies, thus ruining food production.What you just read would describe South Sudan today. The description could also fit the United States during the War of 1812.

A Small But Solid Victory for Liberal Education at Yale

by Jim Sleeper

Just as the Tunisian vendor who sparked the Arab Spring was provoked not only by one bureaucratic or police affront but also by a long train of abuses, petty and large, that had alienated many Tunisians from the government, so the Yale professors who passed a resolution decisively (100 to 69) over their President Richard Levin's objection, in his presence, on April 5 were prompted by a lot more than the resolution's explicit concern for abuses of academic freedom, civil liberties and human rights by the government of Singapore, with whose National University Levin and the Yale Corporation are setting up a brand-new undergraduate college.The faculty made clear that it was expressing larger concerns summarized two days before in a Yale Daily News column by Yale's Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Seyla Benhabib, the resolution's author (and my wife; this is a blog commentary, not only a report; I provide the links to other accounts below).

It's Not Road Rage, It's Terrorism

by Daniel Pipes

On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli doctor of American origins, went to the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and murdered twenty-nine Muslims with an automatic weapon before being overwhelmed and himself killed. This massacre prompted conspiracy theories and riots in Muslim circles, including accusations that the government of Israel stood behind Goldstein, an allegation that strenuous denunciations of his attack by the Israeli government did not fully deflect.Rashid Baz, who attacked a Jewish target in New York City in 1994.

Power Pivot or Duffer’s Divot?: Obama’s Asia Policy

by Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine

As a founding father of the realist approach to international relations, Hans Morgenthau understood that a realist policy, while grounded in the play of power, should be tempered by prudence and historical experience. By this standard the Obama administration’s “pivot toward Asia” (announced in a string of statements, most notably the January 2012 strategic review) fails egregiously.

The GOP Doesn't Have a Foreign Policy -- They're Just Against Whatever Obama is For

by Steve Hochstadt

It would be difficult to find a time in our recent history when the foreign policy of a presidential administration was as unsuccessful as under George W. Bush. Not just one, but two wars started and carried out for years without any success, Osama bin Laden still hiding after years of fruitless search (though under Bush's successor bin Laden is now hiding six miles under the ocean with a hole in his head), a worsening situation in the Middle East, and anti-American feeling growing all over the world.Not one mission was accomplished.It’s not surprising that Republicans since 2008 have been scrambling to figure out what they should advocate. The ideas that the Republican presidential candidates have proposed over the past year demonstrate the bankruptcy of their foreign policy thinking. These problems are exemplified by expressions of the candidates’ policy towards Israel.