Uncategorized Archives - Foreign Policy In Focus

Keeping All Options on the Table: A Roadmap to Negotiation or War?

by Farideh Farhi, Erik Leaver | Mar 5, 2007

In the light of the passing of the late February deadline imposed by the UN Security Council Resolution 1737 and Iran’s refusal to comply, Washington is abuzz with wildly diverse plans regarding how to deal with Iran. Just days after the deadline, on February 24, Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated the Bush administration’s long standing position that “all options are on the table" if Tehran does not suspend uranium enrichment activities. On the other side of the spectrum, the announcement that the U.S. will attend the regional security conference held in Baghdad on March 10th and is open to talks with the representatives of Iran who will also be attending has highlighted the possibility of direct negotiations between the two countries

Just Climate Change?

by John Feffer | Feb 26, 2007

What is the world coming to when a wonky slide show wins an Oscar for best documentary? The Inconvenient Truth is about just that: what the world is coming to. And Hollywood is sufficiently freaked out by the prospect of eco-apocalypse to bestow its highest honor on such a low-tech cinematic undertaking.

On Chomsky

by John Feffer | Feb 19, 2007

Back in the early 1990s, an editor at Harper’s asked me for suggestions of progressive foreign policy analysts who could participate in one of their roundtable discussions. I provided a short list, with Noam Chomsky on top. The editor thanked me politely but said that the Chomsky suggestion wouldn’t fly. In so many words he said that the great linguist and critic of U.S. foreign policy didn’t belong at the table with the sober, even-handed discussants. Chomsky was "too out there."

Iran in Iraq?

by John Feffer, Stephen Zunes | Feb 14, 2007

Faced with growing public opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq, the Bush administration has been desperately trying to divert attention to Iran. Washington has gone so far as to make a series of dubious and unfounded charges that blame the Iranian government for the difficulties facing American forces fighting the Iraqi insurgency.

Rise and Fall of Nations

by John Feffer | Feb 12, 2007

At the beginning of Chinese filmmaker Jiang Yimou’s popular movie Hero , a martial arts master arrives at the court of the powerful Xin ruler. The master swordsman, an orphan who goes by the moniker Nameless, harbors a secret desire to assassinate the king on behalf of his own wronged territory, the nation of Zhao. It is the era of the Six Kingdoms more than 2,000 years ago. The king of Xin proposes to defeat the warring factions and unite the country. Only Nameless, it seems, can stop him.

The Najaf Massacre: Annotated

by John Feffer, Conn Hallinan | Feb 7, 2007

As the fables about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and clandestine ties with al-Qaida began to unravel following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the flagship of U.S. news reporting, The New York Times, took itself to task for its failure to challenge its news sources. “Information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged,” the Times wrote in May 2004. “Articles based on dire claims about Iraq trended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.”

Kosovos Tricky Waltz

by Fred Abrahams, John Feffer | Feb 7, 2007

The much-anticipated UN plan for Kosovo’s final status unveiled in part last week is a crucial step to resolve the long-standing conflict over the restive province in what used to be Yugoslavia’s southwest. While avoiding the controversial word “independence,” UN Special Envoy Matti Ahtisaari presented the outlines for a new Albanian majority state with a period of international supervision and substantial autonomy for the minority Serbs.

Targeting Journalists

by John Feffer | Feb 5, 2007

It’s not been a good time to be a journalist. Outside the United States, reporters literally take their lives into their own hands to cover dangerous stories. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 55 journalists died in 2006, a steady increase over the last several years. The mafia-style hit of Anna Politkovskaya in Russia made headlines. Less well publicized were the deaths of 32 journalists in Iraq. More journalists have died in Iraq than in any other country or any other conflict since CPJ has been collecting statistics. Nor was Latin America particularly safe, as Hernán Uribe writes in a recent Americas Program report.

China’s Environmental Policy

by John Feffer, Juli S. Kim, Jennifer L. Turner | Feb 1, 2007

The economic boom Deng Xiaoping sparked in 1980 brought millions out of poverty and turned China into the world’s factory. However, by following in the footsteps of many western countries that opted to “pollute first and clean up later,” China built its economic success on a foundation of ecological destruction. This environmental destruction is threatening the economy, human health, and social stability, as well as potentially causing irreparable damage to the water, soil, and forest ecosystems.

The Point of Protest

by John Feffer | Jan 29, 2007

At Saturday’s anti-war demonstration in Washington, my 84-year-old mother slipped as she stepped off a curb and fell backward. A young man in a small knot of anarchists caught her and gently restored her to the vertical. And on we marched. Leave no grandmother behind!