Daryl Kimball contends that I and my former boss, Ted Galen Carpenter (vice president of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute), are "like the Bush policy team" because we advanced "the proposition that aggressive and erratic regimes with nuclear weapons are a threat to their neighbors, while nuclear arsenals in the hands of stable, democratic, U.S. allies are not."
A jury verdict in Memphis late last year caused little stir among the general public, but it may have caught the attention of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other high officials of the Bush administration. The jury found Colonel Nicolas Carranza, former Vice Minister of Defense of El Salvador and now a U.S. citizen living in Memphis, responsible for overseeing the torture and killing in that country 25 years ago. 1 Could similar charges be brought against high U.S. officials for the actions of their subordinates in Abu Ghraib, Falluja, and Guantanamo?
There’s no escaping it. Changing monsoons, agriculture in crisis, environmental refugees—climate change is looming ever larger on the horizon of governments everywhere.
We stand, first, with the emerging scientific consensus, which tells us we have very little time to act if we honestly expect to avoid a global (as opposed to a “merely local”) climate catastrophe. Further, we insist, contrary to the pretended realism of those who seek to be “reasonable,” on a rather direct approach. We do not, for example, imagine that carbon concentrations that would quite probably yield 3ºC or 4ºC of warming can reasonably be considered “safe.” 1 Instead, we prefer to stay in the reality-based world of those (the E.U., the Climate Action Network) who draw the line at 2ºC maximum (which is itself not by any means safe) and who admit that avoiding a global climate catastrophe is going to be difficult indeed.
Ten years ago, I wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times urging that Kosovo Albanians be included in the Bosnia peace talks then being held in Dayton, Ohio. I warned that the nonviolent strategy of Kosovo Albanians was endangered by an increasingly impatient population which was beginning to believe that the United States would only recognize their plight if they took up arms.
This is a tale about a vote, a strike, and a sleight of hand.
Key Points