Kenneth Weisbrode: America now faces a situation to which neither benign neglect nor grandstanding will suffice to distract it from its central task of underwriting a peaceful international system. For all that the “new world order” took on a slanderous meaning in certain quarters during the 1990s, it still seems to be what much of the globe wants.
Terrorism State Lottery Winners Not Welcome in the Secure Homeland
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Denis Campbell: So when someone says ‘airport security,’ remember these El-Al examples. Aside from the tail’s blue Star of David targeting the aircraft during take-off and landing below 1,000 feet, I never felt safer on any airplane.
Wars “R” Us: Making the World Safe for American Domination
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Emily Spence: Wars are big business, most notably for investors and employees in the aerospace and defense industries. The related purposes, like the ones guiding most corporations, are hardly humanistic. Instead new sources of revenue, cheap resources from conquered lands, and new markets for products and services are the sine qua non.
Learning the Wrong Lessons From the Attempted Bombing
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Ivan Eland: Although Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano’s stance that “the system” worked buckled under withering ridicule, she was right—but only if the non-governmental aspects of that system are included. The government’s performance and after-incident measures are ridiculous and even ill-advised.
Ridding America of Warmongers
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Sherwood Ross: Disgusted Americans who vote for politicians that talk peace yet, once elected, support wars, need to get active in between elections. Just voting every four years won’t hack it.
Reducing Our Only Existential Threat
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Ivan Eland: Despite its recession from the headlines, the Soviet Union and now Russia has been and still is the only country to have enough nuclear warheads to pose such a cataclysmic threat to the U.S. homeland.
Supernaturally Yours
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I’m slow, but I just caught onto the obvious, that extremist Islam is the new Communism, i.e. the new enemy of the United States. Has there been one that I missed? After all, there must be an enemy. We can’t just get along together.
In War, Winners Can Be Losers
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Of course, a case can be made that it is better for a nation to win a war than to lose it. But perhaps it is time to learn from the world’s tragic, blood-stained history that there is a third alternative: using our intelligence and creativity to resolve conflicts without war.
Obama’s Nobel Speech Comes Up Short
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Pardon me if I can’t join in the fawning praise for President Obama’s Nobel address. “It was, as ever, a bravura performance,” one newspaper said editorially. That it was, but I can’t agree with those, including some people with whom I’m usually in agreement, that it was a “good” speech. It wasn’t good at all. [...]
Mr. President, War Is Not Peace
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Lofty rationales easily tell us that warfare is striving for the noble goal of peace. But the rationales scarcely intersect with actual war. The oratory sugarcoats the poisons, helping to kill hope in the name of it.
Thinking Outside the Box: What Obama Could Have Said
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nstead of resorting to outdated thinking, what if Obama had drawn upon modern instruments of international and interpersonal relations? What if he had adopted a program of change in the way the United States relates to the world?
Obama’s Contributions to a Dying Empire
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Old habits die hard, especially imperialist ones. Imperial imperatives, whether economic, geopolitical, or ideological, persist because the ruling elites are dependent on them. In order to conceal imperialist objectives, presidents and other leaders of the US political class rely on the rhetoric of national security and America’s supposed benevolent global purpose. And, so, with President [...]
Government Terrorism Lists Are a Holiday Turkey
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The FBI’s terrorism watch list, from which the smaller no fly-list is derived, has 1,000,000 people listed, but according to officials, only a mere 400,000 of them are real people—the rest are aliases. Whew! I was getting worried there for an instant.
How Ike Can Help Obama’s No Nukes Quest
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Ike believed that nuclear weapons were the only thing that could destroy the United States. His open skies and test ban initiatives were to put brakes on the arms race and pave the way toward nuclear disarmament. President Obama is now the leader facing the nuclear menace. He can wisely build upon Ike’s effforts in seeking to control the nuclear threat that looms over the world.
No Nukes: STILL the Only “Good Nukes”!!!
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This past June, heads of energy companies and heads of Ohio’s State Government came together to announce something that was, for me, both dreadfully unexpected and dreadfully dreadful, too: that they would undrertake to build a new nuclear power plant in Piketon, Ohio
Winners and Losers in the American Warfare State
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After the long-suffering civilian population of Iraq, whose “crime” was having oil — a country that has been rendered virtually unlivable—the big losers are the American taxpayers who are bleeding income, jobs, and quality of life, not just sacrificing family members, on behalf of a runaway war machine.
A Worse Bybee Memo
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Jay Bybee wrote another memo that nobody has noticed, one purporting to authorize crimes far worse than torture, the same crimes the torture was itself intended to create false justifications for. On October 23, 2002, Assistant Attorney General Bybee signed a 48-page memo to the “counsel to the president” (Alberto Gonzales) titled “Authority of the [...]
We Don’t Need a War on Terrorism
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Many opponents of the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq have always argued that this conflict is an irrelevant and even counterproductive sideshow to the real “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan. In fact, Barack Obama led the parade to initiate a troop surge in Afghanistan after having opposed it in Iraq.
When Congress Failed to Stop the Vietnam War
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Although polls show that two-thirds of the American public think that the war in Iraq is a mistake, Congress is having trouble stopping it. In fact, it continues to fund the war. Congress recently voted to appropriate $162 billion more for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the bill, the Democrats included domestic benefits [...]
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Obama’s Peace Prize Continues Tradition of Dubious Choices
Only a few commentators, including the president, seemed to sheepishly realize the irony of his receiving the prize shortly after escalating one war and while continuing to fight another. You would have thought that the escalation alone would have been enough to satisfy all of the warheads at home; but to stanch the domestic fallout from being associated with too much peace, Obama, when accepting the peace award, gave a speech defending war.