War & Peace
-
As Kevin Drum notes, our mission in Libya–ostensibly aimed at protecting civilians from Qaddafi’s regime–has become a bona fide intervention into a civil war. When this was being pitched as a humanitarian effort to protect civilians, it seemed unseemly to ask about the character of the rebels or the nature of the government they would Read more
-
Good post from Digby on the humanitarian rationale for our latest war: We intervene in places in which we have large financial and strategic interests, period. It’s merely a convenience to attach a humanitarian label to it and persuade everyone that we are doing God’s work instead. Even the arguments for Iraq were all wrapped Read more
-
…take all those proud feelings about the United States standing up for freedom and human rights in Libya and turn them inside out, and vomit into them. That’s Bahrain. More here. Sigh. Read more
-
Well, it looks like we’re going for a hat trick–three wars at once! Qaddafi’s a monster, of course, but this is intervention into another nation’s civil war. And if the no-fly zone and “no-drive zone” don’t work (and given historical precedent, that’s not at all unlikely), the pressure for further escalation will be immense. I Read more
-
This is late, but it was nice to see Nick Kristof publish a column (on Christmas Day, appropriately enough) making the case for reduced military spending. To me, the person who has made the case that Americans over-rely on military solutions most persuasively is Andrew Bacevich in his three books The New American Militarism, The Read more
-
The American Prospect’sAdam Serwer has a good piece on the recent anti-TSA backlash, noting that the American public’s ire has only been aroused at government infringements on personal liberty now that it seems to be affecting solid middle-class (read: economically privileged, white, non-Muslim) citizens. The amount of freedom Americans have handed over to their government Read more
-
From the Guardian, which received the latest batch of documents: The new logs detail how: • US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished. • A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad Read more
-
I finished Andrew Bacevich’s Washington Rules last night, and it’s a worthy successor to his New American Imperialism and Limits of Power. Bacevich tells the story of how the “rules” that govern the U.S. foreign policy consensus–in brief, the imperative to maintain American military hegemony and capability for “power projection” at all costs–have been maintained Read more
-
Afghanistan expert Rory Stewart offers a sympathetic, yet not uncritical, analysis of President Obama’s war strategy. For my part, I remain skeptical: I was initially supportive of the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which I thought amply justified, but over time the justification for staying on in a nation-building capacity seemed increasingly elusive. Nevertheless, Read more
-
From an LA Times article on plans to possibly expand the drone attacks in Pakistan to large population centers: the CIA airstrikes are highly unpopular among the Pakistani public, because of concerns over national sovereignty and civilian casualties. If drone attacks now confined to small villages were to be mounted in a sizable city, the Read more
A Thinking Reed 