When President George W. Bush admitted finally on September 5 that the CIA held suspected terrorists overseas and interrogated them according to an “alternative set of procedures”—an intriguing euphemism for torture—he gave the speech before a hand-picked audience. No pesky journalists were allowed to interrogate the president. In the audience were relatives of those who died on September 11.
In June 2003, I made my first trip to Syria, home to generations of my family, the two oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth (Damascus and Aleppo), the final resting place of Kurdish leader Salahaddin and on a lighter note, purveyor of arguably the most decadent, mind-numbing syrupy sweets.
The images most Americans have of the recent war in Lebanon are of shattered cities, dead civilians, and terrified people bunkered down in basements or picking their way through blasted streets. The carnage of modern war draws the media as ancient battles called forth the Valkyries.
According to the Pentagon, the latest generation of landmine will liberate the military from all those messy civilian casualties that have so upset the international community.
The UN needs a rapidly deployable UN Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS). Such a force, if it currently existed, would already be on the ground in Lebanon, creating a secure environment for a replacement team of more permanent peacekeepers. In Sudan, UNEPS could have been deployed with 48 hours of the May peace agreement to stabilize a chaotic situation. Currently the UN does not have the capacity to respond rapidly to emergencies around the world.
The Middle East has always been a place where illusion paves the road to disaster. In 1095, Pope Urban’s religious mania launched the Crusades, the reverberations of which still echo through the region. In 1915, Winston Churchill’s arrogance led to the World War I bloodbath at Gallipoli. In 2003, George Bush’s hubris ignited a spiral of chaos and civil war in Iraq.
FPIF invited Conn Hallinan and John Rivera to debate the issue of food aid. Hallinan, the author of the FPIF piece “The Devil’s Brew of Poverty Relief,” has been critical of the relationship between the food aid community and commercial interests. Rivera, a former reporter and editor at the Baltimore Sun, is a senior writer at Catholic Relief Services, where he works closely with his food aid colleagues.
All of this information is enough to make anyone’s head spin. And create a new syndrome: info vertigo. Now everyone can be as time-crunched and info-inundated as the average policymaker.
The UN Security Council resolution for a ceasefire to the fighting in Lebanon is certainly good news in terms of ending the carnage. Passed on August 11, Resolution 1701 is also a marked improvement over the original U.S. draft and contains some positive language. Both sides, for instance, are called upon to honor Âa full cessation of hostilities. And Israel must provide the UN with maps of landmines planted in southern Lebanon during IsraelÂs 22-year occupation that ended in 2000.
The UN Security Council resolution for a ceasefire to the fighting in Lebanon is certainly good news in terms of ending the carnage. Passed on August 11, Resolution 1701 is also a marked improvement over the original U.S. draft and contains some positive language. Both sides, for instance, are called upon to honor Âa full cessation of hostilities. And Israel must provide the UN with maps of landmines planted in southern Lebanon during Israel’s 22-year occupation that ended in 2000.