Stand-up comic Louis CK recently did this bit where he characterized America as “the world’s worst girlfriend”: “America is like a terrible girlfriend to the rest of the world. If someone hurts America, she remembers it forever. But if she does anything bad, she’s...
What do Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan have in common? Although it’s true that the United States has conducted recent military interventions in all of them, the more fundamental answer is that they are all artificial countries. That is, they are...
Slate columnist Fred Kaplan recently attempted to defend President Obama's increasing reliance on drones. While he partially concedes that drones could be "morally iffy," Kaplan argues that this "kill list" of extrajudicial assassination could...
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Christopher Swift attempts to show that cause-and-effect is not a concept applicable to foreign policy in "The Drone Blowback Fallacy." What he ends up doing only reinforces the idea that a government can't continue butchering children and...
Even as President Barack Obama touts his progress in extracting the U.S. from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his administration appears to be deepening its covert and military involvement in strife-torn Yemen. Washington is worried about recent advances by Al Qaeda in...
For the second year in a row, U.S. President Barack Obama has waived a congressionally mandated ban on military aid for four countries that use child soldiers. The four countries that will continue to receive military assistance despite the use of child soldiers in...
SANA'A -- It was during moments on our rooftop earlier this week -- seeing flashes in the air and hearing the heavy pounding of gun fire -- when we realized that Yemen's capital city Sana'a was no longer as safe as we had hoped. Violent killings were spreading fast...
"When they came to my village, they asked my older brother whether he was ready to join the militia. "He was just 17 and he said no; they shot him in the head. "Then they asked me if I was ready to sign, so what could I do—I didn't want to die." This is the...
