The Ominous U.S. Presence in Northwest Africa by Sheldon Richman January 31, 2013 Ominously but unsurprisingly, the U.S. military’s Africa Command wants to increase its footprint in northwest Africa. What began as low-profile assistance to France’s campaign to wrest control of northern Mali (a former colony) from unwelcome jihadists could end up becoming something more. The Washington Post reports that Africom “is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest ...
Mali: Here We Go Again by Sheldon Richman January 28, 2013 In testimony before Senate and House committees, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enthusiastically endorsed increased U.S. intervention in Africa. When government officials seem incapable of learning obvious lessons from the recent past, maybe their incentive is not to learn but to keep doing the same destructive things. President Obama’s inaugural speech contained this line, which has gone quite ...
The Tension within American Exceptionalism by Wendy McElroy January 21, 2013 The concept of American exceptionalism is a key foundation of American freedom and militarism, individualism and imperialism. The meaning of the term seems to be elastic, changing through time and depending upon the purpose of each speaker. It has suffered a fate similar to the word “liberalism” in drifting far from its historical roots. What is American exceptionalism? One of the ...
The Hagel Brouhaha by Sheldon Richman January 14, 2013 Washington is going through one of its regular melodramas with President Obama’s nomination of former senator Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense. (In light of America’s foreign policy, this is a title worthy of George Orwell; the position should be renamed the “secretary of war.”) To Hagel’s credit, he has the proper enemies on the right. Neoconservative advocates of perpetual ...
Private Murders versus Government Murders by Michael Tennant December 24, 2012 The December 14 murder of 20 children and 6 women at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, has garnered vast media attention and caused countless people with no connection to the victims to grieve for them. This is not a new phenomenon: nearly all mass murders carried out by civilians generate the same type of coverage and response. But ...
Why Is Foreign Policy Neglected? by David S. D'Amato November 30, 2012 Throughout the (thankfully concluded) election year, everyone — including the electorate and the blindly shilling punditry — was so very zeroed in on the domestic economy, as they perceived it, that foreign-policy issues were virtually completely neglected. No one in the mainstream debate, which was hardly one at all, cared to remark on or decry the fact that the ...
Petraeus Fell for the Wrong Reason by Sheldon Richman November 20, 2012 David Petraeus has fallen — but not as he should have. Before being disgraced by an extramarital affair, the retired four-star general and ex-CIA director should have been shamed out of public life for his horrendous military record in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are we talking about the same David Petraeus who is said to have heroically saved Iraq with the ...
The Japan Problem by Laurence M. Vance November 14, 2012 There were no issues of any real substance debated by Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in the presidential campaign leading up to the recent election. With foreign wars raging, the USA PATRIOT Act and the NDAA threatening Americans’ civil liberties, the police state and surveillance state increasing, drone attacks killing foreign civilians, the drug war destroying Americans’ freedoms, the ...
Supersized Fries, Downsized Jobs by Wendy McElroy November 12, 2012 On November 2 the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that America added 171,000 jobs in October. President Barack Obama lost no time in proclaiming to crowds, “Today we learned that our companies have created more jobs in October than in any of the last five months.” Meanwhile his unsuccessful presidential challenger, Mitt Romney, called the jobs report ...
George McGovern Reconsidered by Tim Kelly October 31, 2012 The late George McGovern will probably be most remembered as the man who suffered the worst defeat of any presidential candidate in United States history. In 1972, he lost 49 states, including his home state of South Dakota, to the incumbent Richard M. Nixon. The electoral drubbing would make McGovern the butt of more than a few political jokes, and ...
Americans Should Reject Obama-Romney Foreign Policy by Sheldon Richman October 26, 2012 If we needed evidence of the impoverishment of American politics, the so-called debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney gave us all we could ask for. We normally expect a debate to highlight some disagreement, but in American politics disagreement is reserved for minor matters. The two parties — actually the two divisions of the uniparty that represents the ...
Pretexts and Provocations by Tim Kelly October 18, 2012 Patrick Clawson, Director of Research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), attracted some attention last month for his remarks during a briefing on U.S. policy toward Iran. Clawson said, I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it’s very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to ...