All Commentaries
Campaign 2000: Why is Military Spending Not an Issue?
After more than a decade of gradual reductions in military spending, the Clinton administration and Congress increased Pentagon spending by $17 billion last year, and are planning to add a total of $120 billion over the next five years. While a decade ago there was widespread discussion of how to spend the “peace dividend” created by the end of the cold war, why have current plans to significantly increase military spending generated so little debate in this election year?
And the Next President of… Texas
Well, Newsweek warned us that George W.’s speech accepting the nomination of the Republican Party for president would be “light on specifics and heavy on heart.” Our hearts were heavy, too, after staying up after 10 o’clock on Thursday night to watch the new nominee say not much of anything. For the preceding hour, we were treated to a shallow, orchestrated pageant with the talent part left out. The whole scene was futuristic and creepy in its precision and lavishness; clearly no one has enough money to pay for something that profligate but the oil multinationals and the Armed Forces.
Camp David II: Clinton Should Pressure Israel, As Carter Did
It is highly unlikely that the upcoming summit between the United States, Israel, and Palestine at Camp David will the kind of positive results that came from the 1978 summit between the United States, Israel, and Egypt. At the earlier Camp David gathering, President Jimmy Carter was willing to pressure Israel to withdraw from all Egyptian territory seized in the 1967 war in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. President Bill Clinton, in contrast, has not supported total Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian lands seized in 1967, and he has actually pressured the Palestinians to allow the Israelis to maintain control of large amounts of their land, including Arab East Jerusalem, the historic capital of Palestine.
Ross Gelbspan on Global Warming
The news is not that climate shapes history. What is news is that the heating of our atmosphere has propelled our climate into a new state of instability. This new era of climate change could well be the most profound threat ever facing humanity. Its most predictable is stability—in our political systems, our economic organizations and our weather.
A World Awash in Weaponry
While the Clinton administration seeks to restrict handgun sales at home, it has quietly arranged to sell more and more weapons abroad.
U.S. Policy Toward Jerusalem: Clinton’s Shift To The Right
It is not surprising that Jerusalem has become the sticking point in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The Israeli refusal to share the city with the Palestinians and the Clinton administration’s refusal to push the Israelis to compromise make successful negotiations extremely difficult.
Moderate or Militant: Will the Real Dick Cheney Please Stand Up?
Prior to George W. Bush’s decision to choose Dick Cheney to head up his search for a running mate–a quest which ended on Tuesday, July 25th with the announcement that Cheney himself had landed the job–for most Americans, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate was at best a dimly remembered figure from the bygone days of the Gulf war.
The U.S. Must Pressure Israel to Compromise
As the Clinton Administration pushes for a high-level resumption of final status talks between Israelis and Palestinians, we are again hearing the mantra that both sides need to compromise, both sides cannot have everything they want and other familiar exhortations. This has been the administration’s approach since the singing of the Declaration of Principles in 1993.
Assad’s Mixed Legacy
President Hafez Assad leaves a mixed legacy. He brought relative stability in his thirty-year reign to a country which had been wracked with coups and counter-coups in the preceding years, yet it came at an enormous price in terms of basic human rights. He maintained a commitment to socialism and nationalism, yet did so through a cult of personality and insular style which alienated Syrians from across the political spectrum. He successfully curbed the influence of extremist Islamic movements, but at a cost of many thousands of lives in a brutal 1982 crackdown.
Into the Quagmire: Colombia and the War on Drugs
I’m going to address two issues. One is a general critique of U.S. international drug control policy, the so-called War on Drugs that we’re waging, primarily in the Andean region of Latin America, and more specifically, U.S. policy toward Colombia and the $1.7 billion aid package, primarily military assistance for Colombia, that’s presently pending on Capitol Hill.