“We will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don’t hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust. That is exactly what our adversaries want, and so long as I am president, we will...
Read more »
Middle East
Another Intelligence Screw Up
The hunt for oil: Another wasteful $1 Billion foreign aid
The recent news that once again the Bush administration plans to announce a $1 billion package of aid to help rebuild another country, this time, Georgia after its rout by Russian forces last month, is yet again a demonstration that the Bush administration is clueless about the use of economic power in foreign affairs....
Read more »
Why John McCain cannot be president
I strongly believe that the country will be in another war a few weeks after Senator John McCain is sworn into office, should he win the election in November. That war will be with Iran, and perhaps, by extension, Russia even if between now and then, the Iranian regime finds a way to assuage the fears about its nuclear ambitions.
John McCain’s dilemma
It is not out of place to find a politician who struggles to get a coherent message together against an opponent but the befuddlement of the campaign of Senator John McCain on how to develop a viable strategy against Senator Barack Obama is especially intriguing.
Obama and the Palestinian question
Now that Senator Barack Obama has had his turn in the merry-go-round called Fact Finding tours by United States Senators, it is time to address the expectations we have of how he will handle the Palestinian Question. Israel and the Palestinians have been at war for the most part of the past 30 years and the chasm does not appear to be bridgeable at this point.
Contradictions and Crisis of Failed States
The International Relations community has focused its attention in recent times on the growing cost of food and its impact on developing nations and the devastating effect the rising cost of food will have on the world’s poor which is currently estimated to be over one billion people. On top of this, most poor countries are perpetually weak political entities and are often ravaged by internecine wars predicated on the struggle to control vital natural resources and land.
Rudy Giuliani and the height of idiocy
After spending a couple of months recovering from his abysmal showing during the Republican primaries for the nomination to vie for the presidency in this year’s general elections, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has come out of the woodwork making us wish he never came out. We understand the tendency of political underlings to utter frivolous statements in support of their “bosses”, but we also expect more from someone who recently aspired to lead this great nation.
John McCain’s fixation on Iran
It was actually shocking to read that Senator John McCain made an off-hand “joke” about the U.S. sending cigarettes to Iran to “kill” the Iranians. The logic of such a level of thinking is frightening, to say the least. It is not stretching it if we argue that for some reason yet unexplained to the American people, the senator is overly fixated on Iran. Such fixations lead to rash judgement and decision making and dilutes the otherwise serious discussions about how to deal with an intransigent regime/government/individual in the international community. We remember too well the results of the fixation a president had on a country and its leader in the not too distant past. Just ask the families of over 4,000 young men and women who went to Iraq and never made it back to the United States alive. Not too long ago, Senator McCain sang about bombing Iran and told those who thought that episode was obnoxious to “get a life”.
Don’t annoy the crazy person!
Now that the three parties involved in the latest round of the Middle East crisis have shown us what they are made of, what is next? The recent Israeli “training manoeuvres, the U.S. exercises in the Persian Gulf, and now the Iranian testing of their longest-range missile seems to be setting the stage for what will be a very dangerous turn of events in the region if not handled delicately.
The fallacy of the Bush Doctrine
The political pronouncements of U.S. President George W. Bush following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center have collectively come to be known as “The Bush Doctrine”. These foreign policy principles were anchored on the declaration that the United States of America had the right to treat “hostile” nations, particularly those suspected of “harboring or giving aid” to terrorist groups as terrorists. The “doctrine” also encompasses the notion of preventive war which stipulates that the United States has the right to depose or remove foreign governments that were perceived as threats to the national security of the country. A further explanation from the text of the National Security Strategy of the United States (2002) and the president posits that the U.S. would adopt a policy of “supporting democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny” globally as part of the Global War On Terror, and overt unilateralism which the President described as “pre-emptive, unilateral military force when and where it (the U.S) chooses”.