President Obama’s selection of John Kerry as the next secretary of state sends the wrong signal to America’s allies and adversaries alike. Kerry’s record in the United States Senate, where he currently chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, has included spurious attacks on the International Court of Justice, unqualified defense of Israeli occupation policies and human rights violations, and support for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Each year Conn Hallinan’s blog Dispatches From the Edge awards news stories and newsmakers that fall under the category of “Are you serious?” Here are 2012’s winners. Conn Hallinan at the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.
Don’t for a second think that the essence of torture is physical pain, no matter what the new film Zero Dark Thirty implies. If, in many cases, the body heals, mental wounds are a far more difficult matter. Memory persists. After the fact, torture can only be dealt with by staring directly into the nightmare that changed us — that, like it or not, helped make us who we now are.
Part 2 of an interview with Drug War Mexico co-author Peter Watt.
The United States is a Pacific power, but Asia is a very different place than it was two hundred years ago. You can’t dispatch “Chinese” Gordon and a couple of gunboats and get your way anymore. Nor can you deal with rivals by building Cold War-style alliances and threatening to use force. The world is too small, Asia is too big, and war would be catastrophic. The Pacific is no one’s “lake,” but an ocean vast enough for all.
The Mexican government’s heavily militarized fight against narcotraffickers has helped keep the country mired in violence and inequality.
Islamist extremists have been targeting Pakistani women who work for the UN administering polio vaccines.
Although most Washington policymakers would simply prefer that Afghanistan disappear, they must still come up with a politically palatable solution regarding U.S. involvement. Here are three scenarios for how the U.S. might manage its involvement in the country between now and 2014.
Were conservative Washington think-tankers helping determine U.S. strategy in Afghanistan?
Anyone expecting Obama to be decidedly more pro-peace this time around is likely to be sorely dispirited. However, there is a diverse, growing peoples’ movement in the United States linking human and environmental needs with a demand to end our wars and liberate the vast resources they consume.