The Obama administration published its new National Security Strategy this week. So of course everyone is debating whether or not it’s actually much different than the Bush administration’s 2002 NSS, which laid out the argument for preventive military action. AP tells us, “Obama’s new security strategy breaks with Bush.” The NYT article on the report […]
Last week the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Maqaleh v. Gates that detainees held by the U.S. in Afghanistan cannot challenge their detention in U.S. courts. There are many jurisdictional issues at play, some of which stem from the Supreme Court’s Eisentrager decision in 1950, in which the court ruled that German nationals […]
The debate over current tensions on the Korean peninsula raises a lot of questions. Is Lee Myung-bak to blame for raising inter-Korean tensions previous to the naval incident? Did he repudiate the Sunshine Policy? Did the investigation reach the correct conclusion that a North Korean torpedo sank the South Korean ship? How should we proceed? […]
As the New York Times reported earlier this week, the Hold-Build part of Clear-Hold-Build is not going so well for the U.S. in Marja. The local population has not been cooperating with the U.S. effort to capture Taliban forces out of fear of being on the receiving end of the Taliban’s vengeance. As a result, […]
In 1976, Robert Jervis, quoting Ernest May, wrote this: “General Marshall, while Chief of Staff, opposed the State Department’s idea of using aid to promote reforms in the Chinese government. Then, when he became Secretary of State, he defended this very idea against challenges by the new chiefs of Staff. In “1910, Winston Churchill, as […]
Blogs have been buzzing for the past week about Yedioth Ahronth’s report on Richard Goldstone’s actions as an apartheid-era South African judge. He sentenced at least 28 black men to death (though not all of them were executed, as their sentences had not been carried out by 1995, when the death penalty was abolished in […]
The Elena Kagan nomination has re-un-corked discussion about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Kagan, while serving as dean of Harvard Law School (HLS), wrote an email criticizing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, calling it “repugnant.” You can read the full text of the letter here. As Kagan explains in the letter, HLS has a policy that requires […]
I’ve noticed a couple arguments recently that use the same logic to disprove a causal relationship. The first one comes from Alan Dershowitz: [J Street’s] Executive Director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has joined the off key chorus of those who falsely claim that Israel, by refusing to make peace with the Palestinians, is placing the lives of […]
As a follow-up to my previous post about the Armenian Genocide, I’ll add that Julian Ku of Opinio Juris wrote last week about the broken campaign promise aspect of the issue. As Ku notes, Obama’s campaign website states: The facts are undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is […]
April 24 is the date traditionally used to commemorate the Armenian genocide, as it was that day in 1915 that Ottoman officials arrested over 200 Armenians in Constantinople, jump-starting a cascade of atrocities that resulted in countless deaths. However, it wasn’t until last night that I was able to check out the exhibit, “The Armenian […]
I’ve been pondering the similarities between the Arizona immigration law and the new Israeli policy of forcefully removing from the West Bank Palestinians who lack appropriate documentation. Apparently, so has Juan Cole. He wrote earlier this week: The Israeli law resembles the one recently enacted in Arizona in one respect. Recently-arrived European Jews are demanding […]
Bill Maher gave some sound advice to the Tea Partiers over the weekend. If you really care about the deficit, he said to them, you’ll start talking about cutting our country’s largest jobs program: defense spending. This advice should also have been considered by the group from the Industrial College for the Armed Forces that […]
Victor Davis Hanson is very very worried about Obama’s Israel policy. According to Hanson, Obama’s administration “seems as angry at the building of Jewish settlements in Jerusalem as it is intent on reaching out to Iran and Syria, Israel’s mortal enemies.” This is a huge huge problem, Hanson asserts, with potentially immensely destabilizing results. He […]
As the Washington Post reported last week, a group of 15 people at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces recently determined that the U.S.’s still fragile economy is the biggest threat to U.S. national security. Sensible. The group’s proposed solutions, though, are strange, as they are primarily geared toward “constrain[ing] entitlements growth,” focusing specifically […]