Democracy & Governance

ANPO: Art X War – In Havoc’s Wake

ANPO: Art X War is a film depicting decades of resistance to U.S. military bases in Japan, through a treasure trove of oil paintings, photographs, contemporary art and film clips I discovered, mostly languishing in museum storage and private collections in Japan. Although I made the film in 2009 and 2010, it is rooted in my childhood in provincial Japan where I was raised the daughter of liberal American missionaries. In the 1960s, my family lived in the Inland Sea port of Hofu, situated 70 kilometers from the Iwakuni Marine Corps base and 120 kilometers from Hiroshima. Although I never visited either as a child, the U.S. military presence in Japan and the atomic bombs we dropped would complicate my identification as an American, long after I moved to the U.S. to attend university and settle in the late 1970s.

read more

Boxed in on the Middle East

The past week has seen the United States effectively relinquish its role as the key negotiator of Middle East peace as the Palestinians, ignoring President Barack Obama’s entreaties, announced their decision to pursue UN membership and be recognized as an independent state. One of the key reasons for Obama’s failure to bridge the Mideast divide has been domestic politics—the power of U.S. “pro-Israel” factions, encouraged by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to threaten the administration’s base if he strays too far from the Israeli line.

read more
Answering Obama’s UN Address

Answering Obama’s UN Address

During the Bush administration, I wrote more than a dozen annotated critiques of presidential speeches. I have refrained from doing so under President Barack Obama, however, because – despite a number of disappointments with his administration’s policies — I found his speeches to be relatively reasonable. Although his September 21 address before the UN General Assembly contained a number of positive elements, in many ways it also contained many of the same kind of duplicitous and misleading statements one would have expected from his predecessor.

read more
Blocking Palestinian Statehood

Blocking Palestinian Statehood

When President Barack Obama addressed the UN General Assembly in September 2010, he sounded hopeful that by the following year there would be “an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations — an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.” Sure enough, in September 2011, the Palestinians asked the UN Security Council to recognize a state of Palestine — but Obama ordered the U.S. delegate to veto the request. What gives?

read more