Just how American bullets make their way into Bahraini guns, into weapons used by troops suppressing pro-democracy protesters, opens a wider window into the shadowy relationships between the Pentagon and a number of autocratic states in the Arab world.
U.S. policymakers should learn from the events in the Middle East that the Muslim impulse for modernity and freedom is hindered, not helped, by Western military intervention. And they should learn soon. The U.S. “Af-Pak” war is accelerating the self-destruction of the world’s second largest, and only nuclear, Muslim country.
Why mess with success? We lied our way into war with Iraq — why not Iran, to?
Wajahat Ali is a playwright, lawyer, and political commentator. His play, The Domestic Crusaders, made its Off Broadway premiere at the Nuyorican Poets Café in 2009 and was published by McSweeney’s last year. He is currently doing research on Islamophobia for ThinkProgress and preparing a pilot for HBO. In our special focus on Islamophobia, he talks with FPIF about the Homeland Security Committee hearings on Muslim extremism, the “threat of sharia,” and the reception of his play.
Nine months after stepping down as Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama conceded that he had just given “deterrence” as the factor necessitating retention of the US Marine Corps on Okinawa because he needed a pretext.
Ostensibly the atomic bomb was intended to shorten World War II, but U.S. war planners were actually afraid the war would end before they had a chance to deploy it.
A no-fly zone would be of little help halting the largely ground-based attacks on Libyan rebels and civilians.
Unpeeling the layers of the onion of reasons why the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.
By enabling India to have its nuclear cake and eat it too — enough nuclear fuel for weapons as well as energy — the U.S. also fuels Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons expansion.
Nuclear miscellany.