From the category archives:

Entities

Talking to terrorists

March 17, 2010

The Washington Post has a passage from Mark Perry’s new book, Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage With Its Enemies. As Perry notes, talking to groups that the US government has labelled as “terrorists” is not only necessary but is a choice that has already been pursued and shown highly effective. As he [...]

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A trial for Saddam and a bomb for bin Laden

March 17, 2010

The Associated Press reports:
Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress on Tuesday that Osama bin Laden will never face trial in the United States because he will not be captured alive.
In testy exchanges with House Republicans, the attorney general compared terrorists to mass murderer Charles Manson and predicted that events would ensure “we will be reading [...]

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Where’s Joe Biden?

March 17, 2010

Has the vice president gone missing? Or is he hiding in a secure undisclosed location?
Strong words delivered by Joe Biden during his visit to Israel were widely reported last week.
“This is starting to get dangerous for us,” Biden warned his Israeli hosts. “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting [...]

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Israel is empowering al Qaeda, Petraeus warns

March 16, 2010

As erupting violence in Jerusalem suggests a third intifada may soon take hold, the CENTCOM commander Gen David Petraeus, testifying before the US Senate Armed Services Committee today, gave a grave warning about the wider impact of a conflict that has been the epicenter of Middle East hostilities ever since the creation of Israel.
In issuing [...]

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Netanyahu remains defiant

March 15, 2010

As Bill Clinton famously said about Benjamin Netanyahu in 1998, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”
Twelve years later there is no sign that Bibi’s hubris has been tempered. In the midst of what Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has told the country’s diplomats is the [...]

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Israel is putting American lives at risk

March 14, 2010

In Foreign Policy, Mark Perry describes an extraordinary Pentagon briefing on Israel’s impact on conflicts across the Middle East. Here is an excerpt and following some comments of my own, the author has provided me with additional background on his reporting.
[Important update: A senior military officer told Foreign Policy by email that one rather minor [...]

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Obama gets kind of tough with Netanyahu

March 14, 2010

The Los Angeles Times says: “a dispute this week between the Obama administration and Israel has ballooned into the biggest U.S.-Israeli clash in 20 years.”
Tom Friedman says: “what the Israelis did played right into a question a lot of people are asking about the Obama team: how tough are these guys? The last thing the [...]

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Washington’s cult of narcissism and Iraq

March 13, 2010

Tom Engelhardt writes:
Hubris? We’re bigger than that!
We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for 30 years. Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad. And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded? [...]

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Why did Joe Biden insult America’s friends?

March 13, 2010

In an interview on CNN, Hillary Clinton was refreshingly blunt in saying that Israel insulted the US:

But now that’s been clearly stated, why did Joe Biden have to cap the first insult by adding another when he said: “the United States has no better friend in the community of nations than Israel”?
That’s not true — [...]

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CIA drone attacks produce America’s own unlawful combatants

March 13, 2010

Gary Solis, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, writes:
In our current armed conflicts, there are two U.S. drone offensives. One is conducted by our armed forces, the other by the CIA. Every day, CIA agents and CIA contractors arm and pilot armed unmanned drones over combat zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Pakistani [...]

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Afghan tribal rivalries bedevil a U.S. plan

March 12, 2010

The New York Times reports:
Six weeks ago, elders of the Shinwari tribe, which dominates a large area in southeastern Afghanistan, pledged that they would set aside internal differences to focus on fighting the Taliban.
This week, that commitment seemed less important as two Shinwari subtribes took up arms to fight each other over an ancient land [...]

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Dubai tells spies to clear out

March 12, 2010

Newsweek reports:
Police in the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai have advised all foreign spies to get out of town—and preferably out of the region—within a week. Although it is widely known in international spy circles, news of the expulsion threat has received little circulation beyond media in the Arab world. However, Gulf News, a newspaper [...]

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Time for George Mitchell and the US to step aside

March 12, 2010

Among commentators unable to see beyond the bankrupt perspective that the United States has the indispensable role of mediating a Middle East peace agreement (if such an agreement is ever to be reached), much is being made about Joe Biden’s tough words “behind closed doors”. Laura Rozen quotes from a Yedioth Ahronoth report:
People who heard [...]

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