For many months, the most dramatic media storyline on Iran's nuclear program has been an explosives-containment cylinder that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says was installed at Iran's Parchin military base a decade ago to test nuclear weapons. The...
The Drug War in Mexico: Corruption Is Better Than Slaughter
Will Enrique Peña Nieto, the new president of Mexico from the corrupt and authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), go easy on drug traffickers? Let’s hope so. During his campaign, Mr. Peña Nieto vowed to battle murder, extortion, kidnapping, and other...
Turkey Claims PKK Deaths in Iraq
The Specter of Domestic Drones
In recent months, the U.S. policy of drone attacks to kill suspected militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen has come under heated criticism. The extrajudicial targeted killings of suspects, including American citizens, is in itself a stark...
The End of American Independence
We celebrate the fourth of July with fireworks, memorializing the American colonists’ struggle against the British empire by reenacting, in symbolic fashion, what was a war for independence – that is, an assertion of American sovereignty. As we’ve built an empire of...
Perpetual Peace
Last year I gave the Israeli artist Amir Nave an old Hebrew copy of Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, which I teach every so often in my Introduction to Political Theory class. He took the book, flipped through it, ripped out the title page, turned it upside down,...
Iraq Government Counts Fewer Deaths in June than May
Shin Bet Arrests Israeli Druze at Syrian Border, Slaps Gag on Media Reporting
UPDATED HERE (7/3/12) The Syrian news service, SANA, reported on June 29 that Israel’s Shin Bet security service arrested Dr. Eyad Jamil al-Jawhari, a resident of the Golan village of Majdal Shams. Jawhari is completing medical studies inside Syria and was returning...