The political debate over sequestration has thus far focused on tradeoffs between domestic and military spending, tax cuts and deficits. Left out are questions about whether the United States should be responsible for policing the world or whether international agencies might address terrorism, aggression, and political instability in a more consistent, comprehensive, and internationally acceptable manner.
While Hagel is the only Republican among the top national-security officials, he is widely seen as generally sharing their worldview on key foreign-policy and defence issues – notably, the desirability of maintaining a “light military footprint”, especially in the Middle East; “engaging” actual and potential geo-political foes through diplomacy; using military power only as a last resort; and relying more on multilateral institutions, such as the U.N. and NATO, and regional actors, to address key crisis situations.
It makes little sense, Butt writes, to order ceramic magnets that are, as ISIS describes, “almost exactly” the right dimensions when ceramics are almost impossible to machine due to their brittle nature.
The latest Academy Awards ceremony, which crowned the well-intentioned but fatally flawed Argo as the year’s best film, merely formalized the nearly universal acclaim that director Ben Affleck has received for his gripping CIA drama set in Iran. It also said a lot about what’s wrong with Hollywood today.
Our political masters keep telling us that making and maintaining peace is one of their top strategic goals. Why then do we invest nothing at all at collecting, studying, assessing and exploiting peace-related intelligence?
The U.S. military, “witch burning,” negotiations with Iran, among other affairs.
Little is known about the current state of U.S. involvement in the two-year Syrian uprising, which may have claimed the lives of over 60,000 Syrians. Senior White House officials have repeatedly expressed concern that increasing the arms supply to the Syrian rebels may result in weapons falling into the “wrong hands”, a concern exacerbated by the influx of foreign fighters in Syria. Yet, revelations over the past week have shown near-unanimous agreement among the president’s top national security advisors for greater military intervention.
Instituting a nuclear-energy program with substandard emergency preparedness is like starting a war without medical staff and hospitals.
The Washington Post recently featured a “staggering” map of 54 highlighted countries that reveals, in the years after 9/11, how the CIA turned just about the whole world into a gulag archipelago. But what’s most striking about the Post’s map is that no part of its wine-dark horror touches Latin America; that is, not one country in what used to be called Washington’s “backyard” participated in rendition or Washington-directed or supported torture and abuse of “terror suspects.”
The attack was certainly a slap in the face to Assad, but was mainly intended to increase chaos in the Arab world.