Scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the U.S. a more responsible global partner.
War & Peace

After Iraq’s Wartime Elections

by , | Oct 3, 2005

Robert Fisk is the award-winning journalist of the London-based Independent newspaper, and he has long been a consistent critic of American imperial policies in the Middle East. “But it was the sight of those thousands of Shi’ites, the women mostly in black hejab covering, the men in leather jackets or long robes, the children toddling beside them, that took the breath away,” he reported from Baghdad on election day. “If Osama bin Laden had called these elections an apostasy, these people, who represent 60% of Iraq, did not heed his threats.”

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Curbing Government Contractor Abuse

by | Oct 3, 2005

Huge no-bid debris-removal and reconstruction contracts given out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Hurricane Katrina guarantee that many of the same companies looting taxpayers in Iraq will clean up from the Gulf Coast disaster too.

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Round Two of Bush vs. North Korea

by , | Oct 2, 2005

Hope springs eternal that the Bush administration, in its new post-election configuration, will finally get serious about the North Korean nuclear crisis. According to the most optimistic assessment, the new appointments at the State Department–Condoleezza Rice, Robert Zoellick, Christopher Hill–will leaven the administration’s hard-line policy with a measure of pragmatism. This more realistic diplomacy will attract North Korea back to the Six-Party Talks. Then the new team of U.S. negotiators will take over, having devised a magic formula of carrots and sticks that will persuade Pyongyang to shut down and then eliminate its plutonium facilities as well as its not-yet-acknowledged highly enriched uranium program.

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The Last Porto Alegre

by , | Oct 2, 2005

It’s not Paris or Tokyo, Beijing or New York. Nor is it São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. Enthusiastic residents of Porto Alegre, Brazil will tell you that their modest city of 1.5 million people in the country’s deep South is “the last bastion of socialism and rock ‘n’ roll.” Indeed, stalls covered with black Iron Maiden t-shirts stand in the public markets, and the municipality long served as a stronghold of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the Brazilian Workers Party. But today Porto Alegre is best known around the globe, especially among those inclined to hold a critical opinion of capitalism, corporate power, and U.S. military aggression, as the original home of the World Social Forum.

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The Dangerous Implications of the Hariri Assassination and the U.S. Response

by , | Oct 2, 2005

The broader implications of the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was seen by many as the embodiment of the Lebanese people’s efforts to rebuild their country in the aftermath of its 15-year civil war, are yet to unfold. A Sunni Muslim, Hariri reached out to all of Lebanon’s ethnic and religious communities in an effort to unite the country after decades of violence waged by heavily armed militias and foreign invaders.

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Iraq: Two Years Later

by , | Oct 2, 2005

In a series of articles written between June 2002 and February 2003, I predicted that if the United States invaded Iraq, it was highly unlikely that we would find any of the weapons of mass destruction or WMD programs that the Bush administration and the congressional leadership of both parties claimed Iraq possessed in their effort to justify an American takeover of that oil-rich country. I also predicted that no operational links between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaida would be found and that a U.S. invasion would encourage terrorism rather than discourage it. Finally, I predicted that we could find ourselves virtually isolated in the international community facing a bloody counter-insurgency war with no end in sight.

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