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 coverage of the initial IAEA account of the cylinder in its report last November has …
Continue reading “How a Nonexistent Bomb Cylinder Distorts the Iran Nuclear Issue”
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 violent crimes but said little about going after drug traffickers. During its unrivaled 70-year reign …
Continue reading “The Drug War in Mexico: Corruption Is Better Than Slaughter”
Turkey claims to have killed 25 Kurdish rebels and wounded 23 more during June 24 strikes in the Qandil Mountains of Iraq. Meanwhile, at least 10 Iraqis were killed and 16 more were wounded in new violence.
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 violation of international law. Add to that the fact that President Obama has ordered hundreds of …
Continue reading “The Specter of Domestic Drones”
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 our own, however, the celebration has naturally degenerated into an orgy of nationalist …
Continue reading “The End of American Independence”
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, signed it, and returned it to me. Nave, …
Continue reading “Perpetual Peace”
As the Iraqi government released its casualty figures for June, July opened with light but continued violence. Despite an obvious surge in deaths, the government said one less person died in June than in May. Today, though, at least five Iraqis were killed and five more were wounded.
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 home via the Golan border crossing when he was arrested. His family, who …
Continue reading “Shin Bet Arrests Israeli Druze at Syrian Border, Slaps Gag on Media Reporting” 
