News Abroad

Iran’s Political Motivation For Ridiculing the Holocaust Again

by Richard L. Cravatts

No doubt inspired by the perverse Holocaust “conference” sponsored two years ago by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, student members of the Basij militia have just published a book of cartoons mocking and minimizing the Shoah, just in time for a festive distribution at a Tehran rally for Al-Quds Day. The annual hate-fest glorifies the Palestinian cause and is an opportunity for Iranians to wildly denounce Israel and America and bemoan the continuing presence of Jews in Jerusalem

A New Cold War in the Caribbean?

by Nikolas Kozloff

When Venezuela's Hugo Chávez throws one of his rhetorical bombs, we learn something about the failure of U.S. foreign policy. Recently, "Go ahead and squeal," he taunted us. The cause of his outburst? Likely American protests in the future over his moves to hold joint exercises in the Caribbean with the Russian navy. No one likes Chávez's loopy Cold-War language, but he's onto something with his nutty words: the way the Bush administration has compromised Amer

What a Difference a Century Makes: China from Imperial Plaything to Global Leader

by James M. Carter

The world watched stunned as a proud and a self-conscious Chinese nation welcomed the games of the XXIX Olympiad in Beijing in early August.  In opening ceremonies that many are calling the most spectacular ever, China announced itself as not only a major global power, something we’ve known for decades now, but also as a decidedly modern, forward-looking nation determined to reach out with the slogan “one world, one dream.”  The spectacle continued on to the Water

The Iraq War and Similarities With an Earlier Conflict

by Timothy D. Johnson

The president stood accused of fabricating an excuse to get into the war.  He stubbornly insisted that his reasons were valid, but members of the op

Why Tom Friedman Is Wrong on Russia and Wrong on Energy

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Tom Friedman asks:

How Moscow's Using Russian Citizenship as an Excuse for an Invasion

by Andreas Umland

One of the main justifications for Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia was that it had to protect its citizens from what Moscow’s leaders chose to call “genocide” by the Georgian army in South Ossetia. The reasons behind Russia’s embrace of this particular argument seems to be that the protection of one’s own citizens has been a common rationalization for military action abroad by many countries, including major Western powers. Russia thus apparently follow

Mikhail Gorbachev Sets the Record Straight

by Joseph Palermo

On the op-ed page of this week's New York Times, Mikhail Gorbachev, in an article entitled "Russia Never Wanted a War," lays out the underlying reasons for the recent events in Georgia and the chill they have caused in U.S.-Russian relations.Gorbachev writes: "Russia has long been told to simply accept the facts. Here's the independence of Kosovo for you. Here's the abrogatio

Iraq: Even If We Win We Lose

by Jules R. Benjamin

            Has George W. Bush surged to victory in Iraq?  If so, he can thank Iraqi tribalism, the success of ethnic cleansing, the loss of legitimacy by Al Qaida in Iraq, the “standing down” of the Sunni militias and Iran’s willingness to let its friends in Baghdad make their own peace with Washington.  The anti-U.S. Shia militia of Muktada al Sadr also left the field.  Only one factor behind victory was

Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries

by Michael R. Fischbach

On April 1, 2008, the New York-based coalition Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) trumpeted the fact that the United States House of Representatives passed Resolution 185, a non-binding “sense of th

How to Get the World To Hate Israel

by Richard L. Cravatts

As part of evaluating the competitive landscape of the popularity of nations, in a process referred to in marketing circles as ‘place branding,’ Israel, to no one’s great surprise, comes up short in brand likeability, ranking last out of 35 nations included in an August 2006 survey conducted by nation branding expert Simon Anholt, even less attractive to respondents than Indonesia, Estonia, and Turkey. How could this have happened to a country that is the Middle East&

Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament: After 50 Years, Alive and Kicking

by Lawrence S. Wittner

How is Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) doing these days?  The answer is that it is doing very well, indeed. In July 2008,

Iraq: The Army Knew Better

by Christopher McKnight Nichols and R. Joseph Parrott

Violence in Iraq has fallen to its lowest level since 2004. That's the good news. The bad news, and the subject of great debate, is how the situation got so bleak. So, why do the American military presence and rebuilding operation still seem to teeter on the brink of failure? Poor planning and flawed execution under difficult circumstances certainly bear some blame. However, the most egregious sin of America’s Army war planners may have been to ignore their own lessons of past occupatio

Why John McCain's "Surge" Success Story Is A Lie

by Joseph Palermo

It really makes the Iraq debate easy for John McCain when he throws around words like "win" and "victory" and "prevail" and "success" without really defining what they mean. A short time ago he was calling for American troops to remain in Iraq forever and that Obama was "naive" for suggesting otherwise. Now that the Iraqi government has indicated its desire for the American troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2010, McCain has gone dovish cred

Torture in Democratic Societies: Interview with Darius Rejali

by Robin Lindley

Water boarding.  Hypothermia.  Stress positions.  Prolonged isolation.   Sensory deprivation.  These “clean” tortures leave deep psychological wounds but few physical scars—and they have been used for decades not only by dictatorships, but by democratic governments, including the United States.  After 9/11, Americans used these techniques on so-called “enemy combatants” detained in a system of prisons from Iraq’s

Is it Safe Now to Admit Jimmy Carter Was Right?

by Joseph Wheelan

Misunderstood, mocked, and maligned, the 39th president (1977-81) will forever be associated with the Iranian hostage crisis and the botch

Why Economic Sanctions Often Fail

by Matt Jacobs

On his recent trip to Europe, President Bush pushed the Continent's top leaders to adopt tougher economic sanctions on Iran. Yet there's every reason to believe that the president's visit, even coupled with European sanctions, will not produce results. European nations have supported sanctioning Iran in the past, but they have continued to have strong trade links with the Iranians. With Bush's presidency close to an end, time is running out for concrete agreements between his administr

Answering Back to Israel's Campus Critics

by Richard L. Cravatts

As evidence of what Professor Edward Alexander has called "the explosive power of boredom" in rousing the liberal professoriate to its ideological feet, Harvard's prolific Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies, J. Lorand Matory, was yet again fulminating in the June 5th issue of the Harvard Crimson about the “chilling” of free speech on campus and seeking, as he has been for some time now, "a civil dialogue in which people with

Supreme Ignorance: America’s Highest Court Disregards the Law of Land Warfare

by Timothy R. Furnish

                  I’m neither a lawyer, nor play one on TV.  In fact, I hated law school so much, back during Reagan’s first term, that after one semester I dropped out and joined the Army, winding up in the 101st Airborne.  But while in the Army  I was trained as an Arabic interrogator, and part of that education included being made to learn Army FM 27-10, The Law of Land Warfa

What We Can Learn from Henry L. Stimson to Avoid Another Atomic Tragedy

by Sean L. Malloy

Over sixty years after the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atomic bomb still casts a long shadow over the human race. While the end of the Cold War has relaxed fears of a full-scale nuclear war betw

The Lessons Obama Should Learn from Kennedy Before Talking to Iran

by Michael Oren

Barack Obama has often been compared to John F. Kennedy in his hopeful message, his charisma, and his youth. In terms of Middle East policy, howe