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

Afghanistan: In Search of Security

by | Oct 3, 2003

On May 1, 2003, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on a visit to Kabul, triumphantly declared that “major combat activity” in Afghanistan was over and that the “the bulk of the country is now secure.” Rumsfeld scoffed at those analysts and critics who dared to challenge this optimistic assessment, derisively labeling them “armchair columnists.” Four months later, on September 7, 2003, during a return trip to Kabul, Secretary Rumsfeld delivered a very different message. He was in the Afghan capital to shore up an increasingly fragile Afghan Transitional Administration (ATA), beset by insecurity and struggling to advance a sputtering reconstruction process.

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A Story of Two Speeches: Kofi Annan and George W. Bush

by | Oct 3, 2003

Kofi Annan’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly was indeed a strong and incisive condemnation of unilateralism–and thus of the current U.S. administration and its hangers on. But in their eagerness to applaud the temerity of the Secretary General in twitching the eagle’s tail, some observers may miss the rest of his message: which is that despite its abuse by Bush and Blair, the United Nations Security Council must come to terms with the need for humanitarian intervention, and, moving some small but measured way toward the concerns of countries that feel themselves to be “uniquely vulnerable.”

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Bush Administration Foreign Policy Team in Disarray

by | Sep 24, 2003

As the Washington, DC area recovers from effects of Hurricane Isabel, President George W. Bush keeps trying to divert the potential “perfect storm” forming from the combination of the constant stream of bad news coming out of the Middle East and growing domestic discontent over the war and occupation in Iraq.

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To Occupy or UNoccupy?

by | Sep 22, 2003

American public reaction to the most recent bill of $87 billion for reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rising human costs of occupation in Iraq, have concentrated the minds of the administration in a way that not even the reality on the ground could. It is a measure of how stark the impinging reality is that Washington even considered returning to the UN for yet another new and stronger resolution.

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de Mello’s Delight

by | Sep 10, 2003

Sergio de Mello’s death might accomplish something the dynamic and debonair UN special representative in Iraq would have loved to have seen–a U.S. request for the United Nations to take a leadership role in marshaling the international force and legitimacy needed to end the growing guerrilla war in Iraq. Now that Secretary of State Powell has initiated negotiations on a new UN resolution, United Nations officials and Security Council members should do more than pull the Bush administration’s fat out of the fire in Iraq. They should, with the support of U.S. internationalists, use it as an opportunity to permanently repair tattered UN-U.S. relationships. And they should demand a deal that will permanently fix the United Nations’ capacity to mount credible peace operations.

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