Latest WikiLeaks cable details the hunt for two missing helicopters originally been sold to the Israeli military by the United States, but ended up in the hands of Colombian paramilitaries.
Back in 2005, Congress considered a bill to remove two dictators a year for the next 20 years. “Some people think a world without tyrants is utopian,” former U.S. ambassador to Hungary Mark Palmer told me that year. “And they think it’s more utopian to have a deadline.” Palmer, whose book Breaking the Real Axis of Evil inspired the ADVANCE Democracy Act of 2005, continued: “we’re down to a limited number of dictators, and it’s entirely feasible to get the rest of them out. Most are pretty creaky and won’t even live until 2025!”
The recent U.S. veto of a UN Security Council resolution denouncing Israel’s settlement policy is a tragicomic way for the Obama administration to abandon its claim to global leadership. But that is what Ambassador Susan Rice’s “nay” vote on February 18 signifies. The battle for a rational foreign policy in Washington has been over for some time. This veto represents surrender.
By allowing Iranian ships through the Suez Canal and refusing to continue to help strangle Gaza, Egyptians are simply opting out of a U.S. regional strategy of confronting Iran.
Although numerous accounts of Julian Assange and his organization appeared throughout 2010, the full story of the WikiLeaks phenomenon had yet to be told. By the end of the year, stories about the leaked documents no longer dominated the headlines. With whistleblower Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for the indefinite future and Assange under house arrest awaiting possible extradition to Sweden on sexual misconduct charges, the newspapers that collaborated with Assange regrouped to tell the definitive story of WikiLeaks itself.
Raymond Davis’s shootings in self defense shoot went beyond not only preventive, but preemptive. Conn Hallinan at the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.
From carving up Switzerland to initiating a multilateral pirate peace process, Gaddafi doesn’t lack for opinions.
Arun Kundnani is a British writer and human rights activist. He is the former editor of Race and Class, published by the Institute of Race Relations in London, and is currently an Open Society Institute fellow. In 2009, he wrote Spooked: How Not to Prevent Violent Extremism, which explored the effects of the Prevent program, the British counter-radicalism policy aimed at Muslim communities. Here he talks to John Feffer of Foreign Policy In Focus about the debate on multiculturalism in the United Kingdom, the dichotomy between “good” and “bad” Muslims, and the status of the Preventing Violent Extremism program.
The political revolts in the Middle East, which have produced the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia and the resignation of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, have also generated a flawed debate about the region. In this discourse repeated ad nauseum in the mainstream press and the policy world, the United States has to balance its views on democracy promotion and stability in the Middle East.
Despite pointing the way to nonviolent revolution, Gene Sharp was once viciously attacked by the left.