U.S. military assistance to key Central Asian governments has increased dramatically in recent years but remains highly “unexamined,” according to new research presented in Washington on Tuesday. Military assistance, which stood at around 5% of all U.S. aid to the region during the 1990s, today constitutes nearly a third the total. This added up to …
Continue reading “US Military Assistance to Central Asia Highly ‘Opaque’”
The terrifying prospect of a Mitt Romney foreign policy has somehow obscured just how badly President Barack Obama has performed. When Obama took over as the self-proclaimed “leader of the free world” in January 2009 there was a war going on in Afghanistan, a lesser war continuing in Iraq, and smaller interventions in Yemen and …
Continue reading “Obama’s Report Card”
Turkey resumed operations inside northern Iraq today. Although no casualties were reported there, at least 11 Iraqis were killed and 21 more were wounded elsewhere.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made his first major speech about U.S. cyber-war policy to a business roundtable group this week. He invoked 9/11 and Pearl Harbor in warning of the danger of a cyber-attack on the U.S: [He] spoke in … stark language about potential military responses to cyber-attacks that threaten national security. The United …
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We are regularly told by interventionists — whether they be U.S. government employees or neoconservative government wannabes — that the United States can readily determine who is friendly and who is not in remote civil wars in the developing world. The first basic rule in any war — whether it be a conventional or counterinsurgency …
Continue reading “The Enemy Is Among Us”
Although the place and time of the next round of talks on Iran’s nuclear program have not yet been announced, the maneuvering by Iran and the United States to influence the outcome has already begun. Iran sought support for a revised proposal to the talks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) last month, according …
Continue reading “Obama Aides Launch Preemptive Attack on New Iran Plan”
Since this presidential debate featured audience questions, and since Americans couldn’t care less about foreign policy, we were lucky to get even a single question on the subject. However, we got lucky when one fella got up and said he and some of his co-workers were disturbed by the news that the American consulate in …
Continue reading “Debate Highlight: Showdown Over Benghazi”
Insurgents significantly dialed down the violence today, but at least five Iraqis were killed in new attacks. Another 10 were wounded.
Here was the oddest thing: within weeks of the United States dropping an atomic bomb on a second Japanese city on August 9, 1945, and so obliterating it, Americans were already immersed in new scenarios of nuclear destruction. As the late Paul Boyer so vividly described in his classic book By the Bomb’s Early Light, …
Continue reading “‘The Most Dangerous Moment,’ 50 Years Later”
On Sept. 11, scores of men with automatic weapons and RPGs launched a night assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, and set the building ablaze. Using mortars, they launched a collateral attack on a safe house, killing two more Americans, as other U.S. agents fled to the airport. On Sept. …
Continue reading “Behind the Benghazi Cover-Up” 
