Cancun was not a surprise. Nor was it a failure. This much is easy to say.
But was it a success? This is a more difficult question. I used to have an irritating friend. Every time you made a strong, implausibly simple claim – something like “Cancun was a success” – he would reply “Compared to what?” It was a pedantic device, but it worked well enough. It made you think, which, I suppose, is why it was irritating.
Terrorist plots are suddenly everywhere. In Baltimore last week, a 21-year-old construction worker tried to blow up a military recruitment center. In late November, federal law enforcement officials arrested a Somalia-born teenager for plotting to bomb a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. In October, a jury found the Newburgh Four guilty of planning to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx.
In all three cases, the major accomplice was not al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was the FBI.
Documents reporting how easy it is to illegally cross the Mexican/Guatemalan border reveal Mexican security conflicts but fail to address Guatemalan concerns.
Talk about return on investment. When it comes to low-tech attacks, will governments ever get the, uh, point?
Given how frequently government officials leak classified information to their own ends, it’s more than a little disingenuous of them to be upset by WikiLeaks.
Its uniqueness and unreality render it useless as a justification for torture. Perfect for a movie, though.
Win or lose, the gangs in Rio and drug cartels in Mexico need to reinvent themselves to provide stability, security, and even livelihoods for communities, or they’ll disappear.
The reactions of British youth to university fee increases can serve, to a certain extent, as a lesson to American youth.
As with wildfires, conflicts between states are the interplay of multiple factors which can generate manifestly different outcomes.
Colombia’s ambassador to Mexico called the Cancun regional summit an “expression of Banana Republic discourse.”