When the guerrillas were around, I fought for what was mine. When the paras came, I fought for what was mine. A guerilla commander once said to me, “Brother, you have to pick sides.” And I said, “No, I choose no side.” I was neither a para nor a guerrilla.
When the first contingent of 250 U.S. Marines flew into Darwin last April, they were greeted on the tarmac with a personal handshake by Australian Defense Minister Stephen Smith and welcomed to the city by the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory (NT), Paul Henderson. When they left, there were no politicians to be seen.
“Blood and destruction,” “dreadful objects,” and “pity choked” was the Bard’s searing characterization of what war visits upon the living. It is a description that increasingly parallels the ongoing war in Syria, which is likely to worsen unless the protagonists step back and search for a diplomatic solution to the 17-month-old civil war.
The demise of secular autocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa has heralded a renaissance for Islamist parties in the region, igniting a rivalry for the hearts and minds of the Sunni world between the Gulf powers of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Although neither country is a bastion of democracy at home, Qatar has proven much more amenable than Saudi Arabia to bolstering democratic Islamist movements abroad.
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is a convicted conman. He knows almost nothing about Islam and even less about filmmaking. And yet, thanks to the power of the Internet and the tense relationship between the West and Islam, Nakoula has generated a major international scandal with Innocence of Muslims, his lowbrow, low-budget movie.
The Obama administration’s “Pacific pivot” gives a prominent place for India, which came as a surprise to many observers. In his maiden visit to India in the first week of May, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta piled on, calling defense cooperation with India “a linchpin in U.S. strategy” in Asia. But while India has largely opened its arms, Indian leaders are wary about being drawn into a Cold War with China.
Freedom Sailors is the story of the birth of the ships-to-Gaza movement with the successful defiance of the Israeli blockade on Gaza in 2008, led by the small boats Liberty and Free Gaza. Within a few short years the effort would focus world attention upon the blockade and compel shifts in government policies as a result of the massacre on the Mavi Marmara.
It seems bizarre that right-wing pundits would be so desperate to use the recent anti-American protests in the Middle East—in most cases numbering only a few hundred people and in no cases numbering more than two or three thousand—as somehow indicative of why the United States should oppose greater democracy in the Middle East.
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s bold initiatives on the world stage indicate that the Muslim Brotherhood leader is attempting to pursue a more independent approach to international affairs. By visiting China and Iran before the United States, forcing several high-ranking leaders of Egypt’s U.S.-backed military to retire, and deploying forces within the Sinai, Morsi is boldly challenging the Washington-Tel Aviv-Riyadh axis of power that has defined the Middle East’s order for decades.
Here’s a milestone of sorts. For the first time since 1998, the House of Representatives voted in July to maintain the current military budget rather than increase Pentagon spending. It’s the first step toward bringing the budget down.