Bernie Sanders Should Stop Ducking Foreign Policy
Al Jazeera
Propping up dictators, rigging elections and aligning with some of the world's more unsavory characters is an accurate description of U.S. foreign policy past and present. It's also a fair characterization of the narrow gamut of thinking for both the wise oracles who urge containment and the hawks promoting armed confrontation. The book focuses on these elite policy makers who have become not just complacent with, but complicit in, U.S. hegemonic crimes worldwide.
There are plenty of tough and complicated details to sort out. The deal may fall apart, especially with conservatives in both Washington and Tehran-and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his crew-sniping away and looking to subvert any agreement. But as the heated debate continues, it will be important that nonproliferation experts play a critical role in the discourse. Science-based statements, not snarky sound bites, should be the weapons of choice.
A Review of Muhammad Idrees Ahmad’s book ‘The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War.’ The central question Ahmad attempts to answer is: Why did the 2003 Iraq War happen? In one of the book’s most valuable sections, felicitously titled ‘Black Gold and Red Herrings’, he goes through several prevalent explanations/theories and takes them apart one by one.
As “now it can be told” theater, TimeLine’s Chicago premiere, the second coming of this angry work, works equally well as an exercise in conspiracy-theory paranoia, journalistic sleuthing at its most dangerous, and a cumulative plea for transparency in foreign policy, banking, and law enforcement (Edward Snowden anyone?).
The first step would be for Washington to put intense pressure on Saudi Arabia, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and Turkey, to halt the flow of weapons to the Syrian rebels, while simultaneously getting Russia and Iran to do the same. A concerted, worldwide diplomatic effort along those lines could work, but there’s zero evidence that President Obama has even thought of that.
The government's crackdown on whistleblowers is a direct threat to our efforts to reform U.S. foreign policy to make it more just. Faced with the threat of persecution by the U.S., NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has applied to the government of Ecuador for political asylum. He has also called attention to the extent to which national security operations have been privatized. Join in urging President Correa to grant Snowden's asylum request by signing the petition below
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