Although President Barack Obama may have won over some key independent voters for the 2012 election by successfully painting the tea party Republicans as extremists responsible for the protracted debt-ceiling gridlock, the outcome for the nation of that policy and...
The mass slaughter of innocents by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway has highlighted the selective perception of such heinous acts of terrorism by U.S. and Western media. Although those who study terrorism cannot seem to reach a standard definition of terrorism —...
The Palestinians and other Arabs have long used violence to try to reclaim land taken from them by Israelis. The approach has long been a failure, but anger has long supplanted rationality, thus leading to periodic violent spasms in Palestine for almost a century. Now...
Remember the forgotten U.S. war in Iraq? In the Vietnam War, after the start of the “Vietnamization” program, which trained South Vietnamese forces to replace leaving U.S. forces, the world lost interest; people thought “problem solved.” That is, they thought that...
Every July 4, the nation’s official birthday, many Americans conflate the U.S. military and what it does abroad with “patriotism.” This past weekend was no exception. Yet there are many things wrong with this line of reasoning. Let’s start with July 4. What happened...
No one needs to tell the public that politicians are slick — and the ones who get elected are the oiliest. President Obama, in a recent speech announcing the phased withdraw of 33,000 U.S. surge forces from Afghanistan by September 2012, told the country that the...
Although John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, laudably sent a recent letter to President Barack Obama suggesting the possibility of a violation of the War Powers Resolution in the attack on Libya, he was 90 days too late. Obama’s violation did not...
Nationalism in many countries prompts their governments to trumpet foreign-policy successes while sweeping disappointments under the rug. The inclination toward such biases may only be human nature, but democracies should also take the difficult step of heeding and...
The jockeying for position on troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq continues. Recently, departing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the U.S. military have tried to box the Obama administration into leaving as many troops in Afghanistan as possible. Gates...
Barack Obama, a president with no prior military experience, has so far cowered in the presence of the military and U.S. defense establishment. The most recent example is the passing-over of Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright to take over the job of Adm. Mike Mullen,...
