Twilight on the corniche in Beirut in February The chatter in the news and on Twitter today is about President Obama’s big speech on the Middle East at the State Department tomorrow. What will he say? There is no question this is a serious opportunity to get the Arab Spring back on track. It has veered […]
The legal debates about the killing of Osama bin Laden continue. My previous posts on the subject (here and here, for example) have focused mostly on the jus ad bellum dimension (the UN Charter’s Article 51 and the inherent right of self-defense). But recent discussions at Opinio Juris turn my attention to the jus in […]
It seems that more and more people share a desire to become invested in the products they purchase. http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/05/16/iou.facebook.qr/index.html?hpt=C2 Artisans in undeveloped areas of the world are connecting to their purchasers via Facebook. They include images of the products and describe the journey it took to get to you. You can even take a picture […]
Think small, think negative. America is bogged down in a seemingly purposeless war in Afghanistan while facing a fleeting enemy, the Taliban. Authoritarian regimes in the Arab world – Bahrain, Libya, Syria, etc. – refuse to allow for self-determination and continue to massacre civilians. Rohingya (a minority under grave threat in Burma) in Bangladesh are […]
Earlier this week Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, pledged to seek a political consensus in Iraq on keeping U.S. troops in the country beyond 2011. According to the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) currently in place, the United States is obligated to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq by the end of this year. Muqtada […]
Did the US get away clean? Almost. As close to it, maybe, as Fate allows. For the past few days, another story, a sidebar to the bigger report, has been gaining steam: one of the Stealth Blackhawks used to invade the bin Laden compound crashed as a result of a ‘hard landing.’ An accident. No matter. It turns out that the Stealth Helicopters used to transport the Navy SEALs are “never-before-seen,” state-of-the-art military technology, composed of carbon fibers that resist standard detection by the enemy. Cutting edge, top-secret, and not available to the world.
The game theory modeling world can be academically exclusive, full of rivalry, and especially abstract, but I believe it can provide a very real, significant push in moving from war and instability to peace and hope. To put my argument up front, if America wishes to take a real step towards furthering peace, writ large, it […]
For those keeping count, or simply interested, George Perkovich, vice president for studies and director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also reviewed former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s recent tome. He comes at it from a slightly different angle than Les Gelb in the NYT, providing excerpts of […]
The dialogue regarding the need to restrict transfers of Enrichment and Reprocessing (ENR) technologies just gained another participant. In a just-released report published by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, former State Department (and DOE and UNVIE) non-pro guru Fred McGoldrick focuses on multilateral approaches to accomplishing this […]
While reading one of my favorite foreign policy blogs, The Compass, I came across this interesting story of Iran’s secret training of militant forces in Latin America, specifically Venezuela, by Fausta Wertz. Wertz apparently came across the story in the Arab Times, which states: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is allegedly training a large number of Kuwaitis, […]
Now that things are settling down a wee bit over in Japan – at least from what my NRC buddies tell me – I thought it might be useful to focus in on the radiological situation which will determine which areas will be habitable, and when. In that regard, I’ve come across a couple of […]
While my (and much of the world’s) attention focused on the Middle East in recent weeks, the rest of the world has not stood around idly. In Pakistan, as everyone knows of course, Osama bin Laden was killed sixty kilometers north of Islamabad, where he lived in a fairly luxurious mansion, protected by thirteen-foot-high concrete […]
Juan Cole writes: Those who are unnecessarily worrying that Obama’s raid was lawless or set a precedent can rest easy; the only precedent is not military, but rather for back-room deals among governments who then put on public Kabuki plays. His statement was responding to the Guardian article from earlier this week, which reported that, […]
As mentioned yesterday, thought I’d do a follow up on the enhanced interrogation technique blog I wrote yesterday. I asked the following question during the May 5th press call sponsored by the National Security Network and the Center for American Progress: …if I’m understanding and hearing correctly, there was historical precedence as well as […]
I have written on the subject of fuel banks before, the idea being to prevent the spread of Enrichment and Reprocessing (ENR) facilities which are capable of producing weapons-grade fuel by providing reactor material produced at a multilateral facility through supply assurances. As I also noted, the IAEA Board of Governors approved a fuel bank […]