All Commentaries
The Advent of the G14
The Group of Eight (G8) has frequently come under attack for being an archaic institution that doesn’t represent the current configuration of global political and economic influence. These criticisms have intensified with the rise of the Group of 20 (G20) financial summit as the major vehicle for responding to the global financial crisis.
School of Coups
The day after Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was deposed, President Barack Obama cautioned against repeating Latin America’s "dark past," decades when military coups regularly overrode the results of democratic elections. Obama went on to acknowledge, in his understated way, "The United States has not always stood as it should with some of these fledgling democracies."
Obama to Africa: Tough Love or Tough Luck?
Africans are wading knee-deep in world financial institutions and leaders advising "good governance," "transparency," "accountability," and the ever-elusive "democracy." We did not need to hear these catchphrases that laced Obama’s Ghana speech. They are so benign that even Africa’s dictators, such as Kenya’s former dictator Daniel Arap Moi, promised them with each stolen election.
Fighting the Forgotten War: Students’ Activism for the Congo
Kambale Musavuli isn’t your average student.
Revamping Plan Colombia
The U.S. Air Force made its last flight from its military base in Manta, Ecuador in mid-July; it’s closing because of Ecuador’s concerns over arrogance and aggression. While the Pentagon abided by the eviction, it didn’t use the occasion to re-examine its missions in the region or correct its overreach. On the contrary, the military appears to be escalating its operations in the Andes.
Gassed to Death
For the last decade, highway fatalities in the United States remained relatively constant, at 42,000 deaths a year. Every year, in other words, we lose more people on American roads than we did in the three-year-long Korean War.
The Intelligence Oversight Mess
Americans recently learned that the CIA dreamed up a plan to use “hit teams” of assassins to wipe out terrorist leaders and gather intelligence about them. More than that, congressional overseers of intelligence were deliberately kept in the dark, per orders from Vice President Richard Cheney.
North Korea’s ‘Papillon’
When I was a boy, I devoured the great work of escape fiction, Papillon, which chronicled the astonishing life of Henri Charriere. The French courts sent Charriere to a series of penal colonies off the coast of South America, for a crime he didn’t commit. Nicknamed Papillon (butterfly) for the tattoo on his chest, Charriere managed to break out of several prisons, including a harrowing escape on a raft of coconuts from the virtually inescapable Devil’s Island.
El Salvador’s Gold Fight
As El Salvador transitions from decades of conservative rule to the administration of leftist President Mauricio Funes, the country faces an international showdown triggered by a restrictive free-trade agreement between the United States and Central America. Canada’s Pacific Rim Mining Corporation is suing the government for its refusal to allow it to mine gold in El Salvador’s rural north. If Pacific Rim succeeds in securing the $100 million settlement it seeks, that would set a troubling precedent. At stake is a question that affects all nations: Can private interests trump national sovereignty under international law?
Would MLK Back Iran’s Protesters?
Combine Iran’s post-election turmoil with the controversy over the nation’s nuclear advances, and few Americans are likely to be unsympathetic toward the opposition movement there. Some bloggers have even suggested that the reformist-led protests are inspired by the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Several commentators have referred to the wave of anti-theocracy rallies as Iran’s "civil rights movement, perhaps implying that the social conservatives who rule the country resemble Mississippi fundamentalists.