To: John Brennan, Langley HQ From: Operative 650, undisclosed location Re: Memo XP1476 Greetings from the tropics! I apologize for not writing to you earlier. As you probably know, if you have my file in front of you, I wrote to your predecessors with various modest...
As the U.S. and its allies prepare for another round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, powerful and wealthy opponents—from the halls of Congress to Middle East capitols—are maneuvering to torpedo them. At stake is the real possibility of a war with...
The Middle East is normally a depressing topic of conversation with talk of ongoing wars, repressive governments, ethnic violence, and terrorist attacks. Yet two of the region’s most troublesome challenges (Syria and Iran) are on diplomatic tracks toward peaceful...
Last weekend, Kenya’s preeminent newspaper The Nation, reported that CCTV footage showed Kenyan soldiers looting during the terrorist attack in Westgate Mall. The “Shame of Soldiers Looting Westgate,” as The Nation dubbed the footage, may be allegorical for increased...
Several months ago, even the most politically engaged Americans had probably never heard of either the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) or the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). That was no longer the case after August 21, when news broke of...
As you have no doubt heard by now, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was informed by German intelligence that her phone was subjected to American surveillance. Predictably she reacted badly and called President Obama himself to ream him out. At the New York Times,...
In his 2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman describes a planet that regenerates itself after the disappearance of human beings. Skyscrapers crumble and bridges collapse into rivers, but the primeval forests take over and the buffalo return to...
In a Boston Review article titled The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike, Nasser Hussain attempts to … provide a phenomenology of drone strikes, examining both how the world appears through the lens of a drone camera and the experience of the people on...
“Omne trium perfectum” goes the Latin saying -- “everything which comes in threes is perfect.” Let’s see: the spiritual perfection of the Holy Trinity, the cinematic perfection of the Three Stooges, and … the nuclear triad. Those dubious that the Three Stooges help...
Not Enough Stock Dividends From a Peace Dividend In 2001, military spending, as a function of the over-all American economy, was, at six per cent, the lowest it had been since the Second World War. … In much the same way that the peace dividend expected with the...