While U.S. politicians Friday debated whether Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden and former Al-Qaeda spokesman, should be tried in New York City, foreign policy analysts were speculating about the circumstances under which he was apprehended by U.S. authorities.
Retaliate against hackers with nukes!
Nuclear deterrence’s inflated reputation is beginning to come back down to earth.
Jon Letman of Truthout interviews Dr. Vandana Shiva—a globally respected Indian physicist, philosopher, and activist—on Hawaii’s role as a testing site for both GMO crops and the military, Hawaii’s relationship with Asia, and on the largely unspoken connection between GE crops, climate change, militarism, and what Shiva calls “a war against the earth.”
Are the beliefs that nuclear weapons forced the Japanese to surrender and that deterrence keeps the peace little more than received wisdom?
Even in its relatively early but visibly intensifying stages, climate change threatens to be the singular event in human history, because unlike every other disaster we can imagine (except a full-scale nuclear war or, as has happened in the planet’s past, a large meteorite or asteroid impact), it alone will alter the basis for life on this planet.
Senators Lindsey Graham and Robert Menendez introduced a joint resolution declaring U.S. support for Israel in the event of an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear programme. “If the Senate moves forward with this [non-binding resolution,] they risk sending the signal to the Iranians that, no matter what was said at Almaty, the U.S. does not have its own house in order to make a deal and is not serious about resolving the nuclear dispute peacefully,” says Jamal Abdi, policy director of the National Iranian American Council.
The lack of vision from Argo’s left-leaning director, Ben Affleck, is disappointing.
While Hagel is the only Republican among the top national-security officials, he is widely seen as generally sharing their worldview on key foreign-policy and defence issues – notably, the desirability of maintaining a “light military footprint”, especially in the Middle East; “engaging” actual and potential geo-political foes through diplomacy; using military power only as a last resort; and relying more on multilateral institutions, such as the U.N. and NATO, and regional actors, to address key crisis situations.
In fact, sequestration will not “gut” our military. Sequestration will take our military budget back to the level it was in 2007, when we were still fighting two wars.