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Hagel’s Departure Should Open Debate on Obama’s Wars

Medea Benjamin Nation of Change, Op-Ed
The talk about resetting President Obama’s security team is misplaced; we should be focusing instead on resetting his bellicose policies. Secretary Chuck Hagel’s resignation should be a time for the nation to step back and reexamine its violent approach to extremism, which has led to an expansion of terrorist groups, and inflated military spending.

Obama’s Long War in the Middle East

William Greider The Nation
Our predicament is substantially obscured by the frightening enthusiasm for war among leading pundits. As Stephen F. Cohen has observed about the Ukraine–Russia crisis, the US media are simply not telling the truth about the failure of our post–Cold War policy. They demonize the opponent and never acknowledge the rational alternatives that exist. America needs an antiwar movement of truth tellers to confront and shame the propagandists.

Why You Can't Ignore Religion If You Want to Understand Foreign Policy

Leo P. Ribuffo History News Network
Historians cannot understand the behavior of the American people past and present without paying serious attention to nationalism and religion--or, more precisely, religions, since religion is a weak category. The relationship between religions and foreign relations is more problematic. Thus my text for this sermon is an old American adage, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: For someone with a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Debunking 8 Myths About Why Central American Children Are Migrating

David Bacon In These Times, reprinted with permission
‘Lax enforcement’ is not the culprit—U.S. trade and immigration policies are. The failure of Central America's economies is largely due to the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements and their accompanying economic changes.

Carbon Delirium

Michael Klare TomDispatch
The Last Stage of Fossil-Fuel Addiction and Its Hazardous Impact on American Foreign Policy: For anyone familiar with addictive behavior, this sort of delusional thinking would be a sign of an advanced stage of fossil fuel addiction. As the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality evaporates, the addict persists in the belief that relief for all problems lies just ahead -- when, in fact, the very opposite is true.

The War That Wasn’t

Leonard C. Goodman In These Times
Snowden and Manning taught Americans skepticism, and not a moment too soon. Knowing Congress would not vote to authorize intervention, the Obama administration turned to diplomacy as a face-saving measure, resulting in a rare example of a people rising up to stop a war before it could start.

The Hubris of the Syria Interventionists

Juan Cole Reader Supported News
There is nothing wrong with doing good where you realistically can. Trying to do good by military means where you cannot can be deadly to both you and the victims. Syria resembles Iraq in many respects. The pretext for the US war on Iraq was its alleged chemical and other weapons programs and stores, which did not exist and which UN inspectors such as Scott Ritter, a former Marine, explicitly said did not exist.

The White House's Flawed Korea Policies

Conn Hallinan Dispatches From the Edge
While the acute tensions of the past month appear to be receding - all of the parties involved seem to be taking a step back - the problem is not going to disappear and, unless Washington and its allies re-examine their strategy, another crisis is certain to develop.
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