On Friday, Feb. 14, 92 prisoners escaped from their prison in the Libyan town of Zliten. 19 of them were eventually recaptured, two of whom were wounded in clashes with the guards. It was just another daily episode highlighting the utter chaos which has engulfed Libya...
"And believe it or not, so far, so good. Most news reaching the United States about Afghanistan is troubling, but the election campaign is going reasonably well" – Michael O’Hanlon, Foreign Policy magazine – 1/14/14 A few weeks after the never-prescient O’Hanlon...
In a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama declared that promoting freedom of religious faith around the world was a central goal of U.S. foreign policy, because "freedom of religion matters to our national security." Hardly. Obama’s...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Call me human. It turns out that I’m no better at predicting the future than the rest of humanity. If as a species we were any good at it, right now I would undoubtedly be zipping through the gloriously spired skies over my...
As the masterful drip-drip-drip strategy employed by Edward Snowden drops bomb after bomb on the National Security Agency's formerly secret Panopticon, we are getting closer to the central purpose of what the world’s most famous whistleblower dubbed "the...
Why is the United States so reluctant to negotiate with other countries and so prone to leap immediately to the option of using force or chicanery in lieu of a more deliberative foreign policy? It might partly be because we Americans are not very good at the subtlety...
The media is our window on the world – but what if that window is dirtied and blurred? How can we really know what’s happening in, say, Venezuela, where an increasingly authoritarian government with Marxist inclinations is up against a rebellion by middle-and-working...
