Is the US is funding its own enemies in Afghanistan?
Bosnian Serb leaders have threatened to withdraw from Bosnia-Herzegovina, the decentralized entity created by the 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended a brutal civil war in the Balkans that killed more than 100,000 people in the early 1990s. Under the accords, Bosnia-Herzegovina were partitioned into a confederation of the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation. Critics …
Continue reading “Warning from Bosnia”
Bosnian Serb leaders have threatened to withdraw from Bosnia-Herzegovina, the decentralized entity created by the 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended a brutal civil war in the Balkans that killed more than 100,000 people in the early 1990s. Under the accords, Bosnia-Herzegovina were partitioned into a confederation of the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation. Critics …
Continue reading “Warning from Bosnia for Iraq”
Recent statements by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel admitting that they were going to use the economic crisis to get other things done is at least surprisingly honest. But it is also hypocritical. Remember when some of these same people criticized George W. Bush …
Continue reading “Hypocrisy in Government”
A front page article on the New York Times starts out with the sentence: "The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters." Not so much. Ronald Reagan, despite his carefully crafted …
Continue reading “Erasing Red Ink: Slash the Defense Budget”
Barack Obama entered the presidency as one of the most rhetorically pro-civil liberties politicians in recent memory. And shortly after taking office, he drew applause from friends of liberty for promulgating executive orders closing Guantánamo and CIA secret prisons, ending CIA torture, suspending kangaroo proceedings at military tribunals, and pledging more openness than the secretive …
Continue reading “Obama’s Policy on Civil Liberties: Bush Lite?”
Africa was always the continent (one of the few) that even the usually interventionist U.S. national security analysts deemed as non-strategic to U.S. interests. Not anymore. The Pentagon’s new Africa Command bureaucracy, which was created largely to defend oil produced on the West African coast (itself a dubious objective), has already branched out to fight …
Continue reading “Battling Christian Terrorists”
Now that their nemesis, George W. Bush, has left office, the mainstream media can be unbridled in their optimism about the future of Iraq. After 9/11, they chose to allow themselves to be duped by the Bush administration’s fairly lame reasons for the clearly unrelated U.S. invasion of Iraq and have been bitter about the …
Continue reading “Misreading the Iraqi Election Results”
When you stop to think about it, people measure how well their lives are going not by their absolute state of being but by their situation relative to their expectations. For example, a poor person in a developing country may be ecstatic about getting a pair of shoes for the first time; in contrast, a …
Continue reading “Guns and Butter (Again)”
The Obama administration is reluctant to turn over too many rocks in the Bush administration’s conduct in the War on Terror. Obama has pledged to reach a post-partisan nirvana, and Republicans could condemn any investigation of Bush administration abuse of the republic as a partisan witch-hunt. Also, the Obama administration has a conflict of interest …
Continue reading “Prosecute George W. Bush for Illegal Acts”