Walter Russell Mead offers an alternative to the Mearsheimer and Walt view on American-Israeli relations.
Latest Updates: foreign policy RSS
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thabet
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thabet
Foreign Office note on “British policy towards Israel, the Arab states and the US”.
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thabet
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thabet
The map below shows US military presence worldwide, which has been produced by Mother Jones. It is an interactive map — make sure you zoom in.
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thabet
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thabet
Well, at least this is a subject about which the current United States administration should know something.
God knows, they’ve clearly demonstrated their total ignorance on the Middle East and the ‘Muslim world’.
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thabet
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thabet
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thabet
The US needs a “hypocrisy audit”, says the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy.
The image below is FP’s Failed States Index:
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haroon
Best. Quote. Ever.
“This is not 1968, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can invade its neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it,” [Sec of State Rice] said. “Things have changed.” [NYT]
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aziz
waging peace: why the US must lead. This editorial in the Daily Star (Beirut) makes a strong case for active US involvement in resolving middle east conflicts.
(via POMED)
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aziz
ah, nuance: Islamists Against Terrorism.
Al-Qaeda’s violent methods and tactics have been coming under mounting criticism this year from Islamist scholars who once supported it. One by one they have been coming out in public to denounce the organisation’s actions as being counterproductive.
via Sunny, who follows up on thabet’s earlier observation that foreign policy is part of the problem, but not the only problem, by asking,
If foreign policy is only part of the problem, a fact neither Islamists nor the pro-war anti-Islamists want to acknowledge, what are other parts to the problem?
what do you think?
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thabet
Russia wants “regime change” in Georgia, says US.
Steve LeVine puts this conflict into context — it is all part of the ongoing ‘pipeline wars’.
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thabet
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thabet
Iraq: the surge or the Sunnis?
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thabet
In its annual report on human rights abuses, the Foreign Affairs Committee has told the British government it cannot rely on US assurances regarding torture and extraordinary rendition.
The FAC said there should be a thorough analysis of interrogation techniques used by the US given the differences in how torture is defined by the two countries. The committee also reminded the government that it was under a legal obligation to ensure flights entering UK airspace or land at UK airports are not used for extraordinary rendition, even if there are no detainees on board (e.g. refueling).
The report also called on the government to investigate Pakistan’s role in torturing British suspects who have dual (British/Pakistani) nationality.
The full report by the FAC can be found online (pdf).
Glenn Greenwald has some more on this from an American perspective.
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thabet
Gordon Brown threatened Iran with tougher sanctions as he became the first British prime minister to address the Israeli parliament. Brown vowed that Britain would stand by Israel’s side as it faced threats to its existence.
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muse
O gave a wide-ranging foreign policy interview to Fareed Zakaria. I liked his response to Z’s query about how he views the “problem within Islam” regarding terrorism. I think after hearing asinine comments from the administration for so long, a common sense response like this seems downright brilliant.
…what we also want to do is to shrink the pool of potential recruits. And that involves engaging the Islamic world rather than vilifying it, and making sure that we understand that not only are those in Islam who would resort to violence a tiny fraction of the Islamic world, but that also, the Islamic world itself is diverse.
And that lumping together Shia extremists with Sunni extremists, assuming that Persian culture is the same as Arab culture, that those kinds of errors in lumping Islam together result in us not only being less effective in hunting down and isolating terrorists, but also in alienating what need to be our long-term allies on a whole host of issues.
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aziz
One definition of neoconservative foreign policy might be, that terrorists are assumed to be sane, and nation-states assumed to be mad as hatters.
The liberal foreign policy prescription would be to invert these assumptions and act accordingly.
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thabet
A foreign policy adviser to John McCain is under pressure to quit after he suggested that a terror attack on the US between now and the presidential election would translate into a “big advantage” for the Republican nominee.
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thabet
Now that the toll of British troops killed in Afghanistan has reached 100, can someone please raise the following question to our political masters: what is the role of British troops in the country?
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thabet
Mark Curtis (The Web of Deceit, Unpeople) has a new book out in October of this year:
Sticking with the Brotherhood, Angry Arab explans why he hates their Jordanian branch the most.
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thabet
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thabet
Matthew Yglesias says McCain is more ‘hardcore’ on national security than Bush.
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thabet
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thabet
A leading ‘neocon’ argues America has always been a ‘neocon nation’.
