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.
Global warming and financial considerations fuel the proliferation of nuclear energy.
When it comes to nuclear energy, a return to the Dark Ages can be a good thing.
Is the nuclear energy too entrenched, especially with Peak Oil looming, to be slowed in its tracks by the reactor crises in Japan?
Meanwhile, Moscow once again boasts more billionaires than New York City.
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.
The presidential meeting this week between Mexico’s Felipe Calderon and Barack Obama looked from the outside like a hastily arranged exercise in damage control. But while most analysts emphasized the tensions between the neighboring nations going into the meeting, the real crisis behind the visit was the failure of what the two leaders most strongly agree on: the war on drugs south of the border.
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.