Commentaries
Remittances: For Love and Money
Yania Marcelino was a six-year-old girl in the Dominican Republic when her mother left their family to find work in another country. She went first to Puerto Rico, then later to New York City to work as a seamstress. There she began sending money back to Marcelino and her three siblings and four cousins. The children often had to travel 15 or 20 kilometers to get to the wire transfer agency, and sometimes the money sent was lost.
Build Bridges, Not Bombers
Foreign policy and bridges are not typically associated with one another, except perhaps in the metaphorical sense, as with President Clinton’s “building a bridge to the twenty-first century” campaign slogan. The recent tragedy in Minneapolis, however, in which the collapse of an interstate highway bridge across the Mississippi River left at least 5 people dead […]
Why Saudi Arabia? Why Now?
The “headline-grabber” read: “U.S. Plans New Arms Sales to Gulf Allies.”
The Saudi Arms Deal: Congressional Opposition Grows
At the end of July, the Bush administration announced that members of the Gulf Cooperation Council – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman – would receive approximately $20 billon worth of U.S. arms sales. While neither the type amount of weapons, nor the timeframe for their delivery has yet been finalized, the list will likely include air-to-air guided missiles, Joint Direct Attack Munitions, upgrades for fighter aircraft, and new naval vessels – all weapons and systems desired by many countries around the world. Although many are calling this a Saudi arms deal, it remains unclear what each country will be getting. The administration has only said that the details of the sales will vary from country to country.
Hope in Darfur
On July 31, the UN Security Council (UNSC) passed resolution 1769 authorizing the creation of a 20,000-strong peacekeeping force to be deployed to the Darfur region of Sudan. This resolution has been hailed as a historic landmark on the way to fulfilling the “responsibility to protect” established in humanitarian law. Supporters of the resolution believe that this peacekeeping force will end the ongoing genocide, which has left 7,000 civilians dead each month.
Gasoline for the Fire
Like a gambling addict who has to keep betting more to cover his previous losses, the Bush administration’s recently announced plan to provide some $65 billion worth of advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel over the next 10 years represents a reckless, poorly considered attempt to mitigate the consequences of its ill considered invasion of Iraq. The deal also represents an admission of failure of several of the key elements of U.S. security policy in the Middle East, and, perhaps most significantly, it represents a clear abandonment of President Bush’s democratic reform agenda in the region.
Misunderstanding Muqtada al-Sadr
In a July 11 Wall Street Journal op-ed, writer Kimberly Kagan touted the success of the Iraq surge strategy. Kagan noted, among other supposed triumphs, that the Maliki government had "confronted Muqtada al-Sadr for promoting illegal militia activity, and has apparently prompted this so-called Iraqi nationalist to leave for Iran for the second time since January." While one can perhaps excuse Kagan’s sunny defense of the surge, (the plan was partly devised, after all, by her husband, Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, a fact which the Wall Street Journal did not reveal to readers) the repeated attempts by conservative defenders of Bush’s Iraq policy to dispute Sadr’s nationalist credentials and treat him as an Iranian puppet indicate a real and troubling lack of knowledge of the Iraqi political scene, and of Sadr’s place within it.
Iraq: Finding the Diamonds?
Last week’s briefings for the press by U.S. civilian and military officials in Baghdad were uniformly upbeat, cautious, and predictable.
The Future of Western Sahara
Morocco’s ongoing refusal to allow for the long-planned UN-sponsored referendum on the fate of Western Sahara to move forward, combined with a growing nonviolent resistance campaign in the occupied territory against Moroccan occupation authorities, has led Morocco to propose granting the former Spanish colony special autonomous status within the kingdom.