Professor John Mearsheimer’s keynote address at the 2013 Army War College Strategy Conference.
Category: War
Ambiguous drone policies cast doubt on Obama’s lofty pledges
An earlier version of this appeared in The National last week.
It was a “season of fear,” he said. Government trimming facts and evidence “to fit ideological predispositions”; making “decisions based on fear rather than foresight; setting aside principles “as luxuries that we could no longer afford”. “In other words,” he concluded, “we went off course”.
We “cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values”, he said. Institutions will have to be updated with “an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process; in checks and balances and accountability.”
It was a fine speech: thoughtful, bold, idealistic. US president Barack Obama delivered it at the National Archives in Washington, on May 21, 2009.
Last Thursday, when President Obama again addressed the question of national security, he sounded equally high-minded. But where in his first speech he had to address the excesses of his predecessor; this time he had his own to consider. The most serious of these were born of Obama’s inability to deliver fully on promises he made in 2009.
At the National Archives speech, Obama had vowed to end torture, shut down CIA black sites, and close Guantanamo. It was the clean break he had promised his base. But faced with a Republican backlash, Obama caved. Torture and black sites were abolished, but Guantanamo remained. Torture memos were released, but torturers roamed free. And to shield himself against charges of weakness, Obama escalated the covert war.
Continue reading “Ambiguous drone policies cast doubt on Obama’s lofty pledges”
A.J.P. Taylor: How Wars Begin, and How Wars End
Historian A.J.P. Taylor, author of the famous and controversial Origins of the Second World War, gives a series of talks for the BBC on the causes of war, titled How Wars Begin; and for Channel 4 on How Wars End.
How Wars Begin
Continue reading “A.J.P. Taylor: How Wars Begin, and How Wars End”
Clive Stafford Smith on the Guantanamo hunger strikes
Clive Stafford Smith on the outrageous case of Shaker Aamer who has been detained for 12 years without charge and tortured systematically. Guantanamo, he argues, is in many ways worse than death row or Soviet gulags.
Foreign policy and Fuzzy Maths on the Scott Horton Show
I was on the Scott Horton Show yesterday to discuss my recent article on the dubious numbers that have been used to conceal the real scale of Iraq’s tragedy.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, a sociologist and editor of Pulsemedia.org, discusses the highly contested estimated number of Iraqi deaths due to the 2003 US invasion; why Iraq Body Count (the media’s go-to source) vastly under-reports casualties; how “excess death” statistical studies work; and how low-balling the costs of war – in terms of blood and treasure – distorts the public debate.
Agony in Aleppo: a city abandoned by the world?
From Channel 4: In the first of a Channel 4 News series charting Syria’s descent in the face of civil war, German filmmaker Marcel Mettelsiefen’s spends several weeks in Aleppo witnessing a civilian population isolated and under siege. (Caution: contains highly distressing scenes of war including images of children who have been wounded and killed)
Syria’s Peace: What, How, When?
Fawaz Gerges and Rosemary Hollis in conversation with Pulse editor Robin Yassin-Kassab.
Obama’s New Strategy in Afghanistan
On Fault Lines, Josh Rushing embeds with US troops on the front lines of Obama’s war and asks: What is the US trying to achieve in Afghanistan, and will it really make the US safer?
What I saw in the war
Reporter Janine di Giovanni has been to the worst places on Earth to bring back stories from Bosnia, Sierra Leone and most recently Syria. She tells stories of human moments within large conflicts — and explores that shocking transition when a familiar city street becomes a bombed-out battleground.
For Omar Misharawi: Killed by Israeli Airstrikes on 11/14/12
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
At death you measure
no more than our arms
When we rise
to blow a prayer into your charred lung
we find resplendent
butterflies
milling about — lapidary
punctuations of our time
together
(eleven months in all)
Horror turned honey
and lustrous
as buds of new fruit
Ya Shaheed
You witnessed
P U L S E 