Scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the U.S. a more responsible global partner.
Terrorism

Too Little Too Late: The Supreme Court as a Check on Executive Power

by , | Feb 17, 2006

Under the Bush administration, foreign policy issues such as warrantless wiretaps, the rights of enemy combatants, and interrogation methods have become the latest topics in the longstanding debate over the limits of executive branch power and the role of the judiciary in enforcing those limits. The issue recently took center stage when Senate Democrats expressed concern at the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito, President Bush’s most recent pick for the Supreme Court, that Alito would support greater judicial deference to executive authority.

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Targeting Teheran

by , | Jan 25, 2006

Iran has long been a target of the Bush administration’s rhetorical ire. The president called it “the world’s primary state sponsor of terrorism,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice characterized it as “something to be loathed,” and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Teheran of designing roadside bombs to kill U.S. and British troops. But with the U.S. military under siege in Iraq, and polls running heavily against the White House’s Middle East version of Vietnam, it seemed just bluster and so much talk.

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Iraq and the Problem of Terrorism

by , | Jan 24, 2006

Last year, 5,736 Iraqis died and 845 U.S. soldiers died in the Iraq War, many at the hands of the estimated 2,000 foreign terrorist fighters based in the U.S.-occupied country. If this conflict is part of a larger war on terrorism as President George W. Bush claims, it’s clear the U.S. is losing the so-called “global war on terror.”

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Addressing the Nuclear Proliferation Challenge: Cooperation is Not Capitulation

by , | Jan 12, 2006

Headline news about the threat of nuclear terrorism and the concerns about the nuclear capabilities and ambitions of Iran and North Korea regimes has led some Washington policy makers and pundits to conclude that the nuclear nonproliferation system has failed. A new strategy, they say, must be developed to replace it, or, perhaps, we must even accept that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

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Getting Real(istic) About Nonproliferation

by , | Jan 12, 2006

Daryl Kimball contends that I and my former boss, Ted Galen Carpenter (vice president of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute), are "like the Bush policy team" because we advanced "the proposition that aggressive and erratic regimes with nuclear weapons are a threat to their neighbors, while nuclear arsenals in the hands of stable, democratic, U.S. allies are not."

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Reflections on U.S. Double Standard on Terrorism

by | Jan 10, 2006

Cuban expatriate Luis Posada Carriles, an old U.S. terrorist chicken, has come home to roost in Bush’s nest, exposing the president’s anti-terrorist policies as a hoax. Posada, 77, unabashedly embodies violence as Gandhi stood for nonviolence. His resume contains a long list of terrorist “accomplishments,” including the bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados in which all 73 people aboard died.

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Israel & Palestine: A Way Out?

by , | Jan 3, 2006

In a 2002 Le Monde Diplomatique article titled “Constructing Catastrophe,” Israeli journalist Amon Kapeliouk challenged one of the central myths about the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. To wit: that Palestinian President Yasir Arafat was offered a great deal at the Camp David talks in July 2000, but turned it down and launched Intifada II.

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