Foreign Affairs
The opening sentence of an article about events in Libya makes deafening the dog that isn’t barking: Mourners vowed revenge and rattled off heavy gunfire in a Tripoli cemetery on Saturday as they buried nine men they said were Muslim clerics and medics killed in a NATO airstrike in mostly rebel-held eastern Libya. Remember when…
It’s not the current president’s fault (although many of us would be inclined to suggest that he hastened the end result), but if Barack Obama wins a second term, it may be that he’ll turn out the lights on the Age of America… at least according to the International Monetary Fund: According to the latest…
He inherited Iraq and Afghanistan and basically kept on the same path outlined by his predecessor. Then came Egypt. Then Libya. Now it’s getting bad in Syria: At least 90 people were reportedly killed and dozens were injured when Syrian security forces fired live bullets and teargas to disperse “Good Friday” protests in several cities,…
In light of the Libya situation, Victor Davis Hanson concisely sums up the truth behind the past decade of anti-Iraq War stances made by liberals and the Democratic Party. Libya is now an exegesis of the Iraq War. By now we know that the Bush-Cheney “shredding” of the Constitution (e.g., tribunals, wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, preventative…
1. Some of the hawkish public affairs commentators could afford to calm down just a bit on the issue of Europe (France, in particular) leading the way on advocating for intervention in Libya, with the United States joining the effort later. You don’t have to believe that the world should return to a rigid great-powers…
It’s so obvious that we haven’t even commented on it, really. Glen Reynolds calls attention to this by Niall Ferguson: The president has been more Hamlet than Macbeth since the beginning of the revolutionary crisis that has swept the desert lands of North Africa and the Middle East. To act or not to act? That…
In a New York Times piece, former CIA Middle Eastern specialist Reuel Marc Gerecht reflects on Egypt and the democracy movement in the Middle East. A revulsion against the Iraq war and a distaste for President Bush helped to blind people to the spread of democratic sentiments in the region. It blinded them to the…
No more salad bowls? French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday declared that multiculturalism had failed, joining a growing number of world leaders or ex-leaders who have condemned it. “We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him,”…
Elbridge Colby has an interesting article in First Things (see here if you’re not a subscriber) addressing the ability of nuclear weapons to fit within the just war tradition. One point worth emphasizing comes to mind upon reading his summation of the “nay” argument (with which he disagrees): The argument proffered by the churchmen is…
It is odd that one doesn’t hear, see, or read more on this: Among the two most alarming revelations is the already completed sale and delivery, to Venezuela by Russia, of nearly 2,000 advanced, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles capable of hitting aircraft as high as 19,000 feet. Equally and perhaps more alarming is an October agreement…
