The first 20 detainees arrived at Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray eight years ago, on January 11, 2002. Just over seven years later, President Barack Obama—on his second full day after taking office—issued an order to shut the prison within a year.
The United States may be on the verge of involvement in yet another counterinsurgency war which, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, may make a bad situation even worse. The attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight by a Nigerian apparently planned in Yemen, the alleged ties between the perpetrator of the Ft. Hood massacre to a radical Yemeni cleric, and an ongoing U.S.-backed Yemeni military offensive against al-Qaeda have all focused U.S. attention on that country.
What needs rewriting is not the Geneva Conventions but Israel’s abusive and illegal war strategy.
Stripping Bare the Body by leading political journalist and author, Mark Danner, chronicles American foreign policy in the last quarter century through narratives of political violence, conflict, death, and torture across the globe. Separated in four sections, Danner uses his collection of dispatches written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books to examine the political instability and violence seen in Haiti, the Balkans, and Iraq. Danner critiques American foreign policy, writing of America’s hypocrisy and weakness in the ideologically uncertain post-Cold War era.
In Oslo last week, President Barack Obama ironically used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize to deliver a lengthy defense of the “just war” theory and dismiss the idea that nonviolence is capable of addressing the world’s most pressing problems.
Six months ago, President Obama dazzled audiences from Cairo to Jakarta—and everywhere in between and beyond—with his call for a “new beginning” with the Muslim world. It came after the new president made a series of confidence-building statements, speeches, and diplomatic overtures with a consistent, sobering message: It is time for relations based on “mutual respect” and “mutual interest.” Obama declared at Cairo University that there “must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.”
When President Barack Obama laid out his plan for winning the war in Afghanistan, behind him stood an army of ghosts: Greeks, Mongols, Buddhists, British, and Russians, all whom had almost the same illusions as the current resident of the Oval Office about Central Asia. The first four armies are dust. But there are Russian survivors of the 1979-89 war that ended up killing 15,000 Soviets and hundreds of thousands of Afghans as well as virtually wrecking Moscow’s economy.
The United States has spent nearly a trillion dollars over the past seven years, fighting two wars in vastly different places. A small portion of this effort has been dedicated to what has commonly been called nation-building. In fact, our mission has been a mixture of both state-building, which further develops the institutions of government, and nation-building, which constructs roads, schools and other projects. This approach is not entirely new, but these initiatives have become an important and accepted paradigm for the conduct of war in this century.
David Swanson’s provocative new book Daybreak brings to light the many crimes and injustices perpetrated by the Bush team during its eight-year term. The Obama administration’s reluctance to confront head-on the various illegalities committed by the Bush-Cheney regime l eaves the door open, Swanson argues, for future abuses of power, “I oppose accepting the pretense that one president orders torture legal and the next orders it illegal,” he writes. “If we accept that, then what is to prevent a future president declaring it legal again?” It isn’t enough for the Obama administration to reverse the policies of George W. Bush, which ranged from torture and censorship to spying and misappropriation of funds. Criminal prosecution of Bush and Dick Cheney can diminish the likelihood of future abuses of executive authority.
A headline for a recent McClatchy news story suggests that the decision of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah not to contest the second round of the Afghan presidential election will have a major impact on whether the Afghan government is perceived as legitimate: “Challenger’s pullout leaves Afghan government of dubious legitimacy.”