The U.S. military’s ‘anti-Islam classes’ Welcome - Right Web - Institute for Policy Studies. Think Tanks & Politics. Empire’s Ways of Knowing. During the run up to the invasion of Afghanistan, three burly American classmates jeered at me.
They said, “We’re gonna kill Osama.” Presumably, I would be especially aggrieved at Osama’s death, since I am a Muslim, and therefore, an Osama sympathizer if not also a bomb-carrying terrorist. My classmates were full of assurance and triumphalist pride. They said: “We can hit even a coffee mug in a cave.” The cave stood for where I am from, the enemy territory, the blank space on the map, the primitive place. The capacity to do violence allows the powerful to exercise the privilege of what Gayatri Spivak has called “sanctioned ignorance.” Ahmed writes, “We have programmed forgetfulness in our civic and political lives.”
Geography, a sense of the place, its people, local histories, and memory, is from where Ahmed’s critique of power emerges and where it is located. But Ahmed is no scribe of power. Salman Hussain is a writer, software programmer, and dog lover based in Wisconsin. Obama Takes on the LRA. The privatization of war... 9 Craziest Foreign Policy Statements from Saturday's Republican Debate - Max Fisher - International. It's not hard to see why the first GOP debate on foreign policy was held on a Saturday night and only partially broadcast nationwide Reuters Whatever you think of the Republican presidential candidates on domestic issues -- which are, so far, at the heart of the 2012 race -- their collective performance on foreign policy has been a bit softer. The candidates tend to agree more than they disagree, prefer the general (Israel good, Iran bad) to the specific (don't ask about Pakistani nukes), and can occasionally make some real blunders when discussing America's role in the world.
Unaccountable Killing Machines: The True Cost of U.S. Drones - Joshua Foust - International. Officials often portray the global expansion of deadly drone strikes as an unequivocal success. But are we really accounting for all the consequences? Reuters A series of articles have been published recently about the extent and, in some cases, failures of the drone program so famously expanded under President Obama's watch.
The first, a blockbuster article by the Washington Post's Greg Miller, brings to light some truly worrying aspects of a policy that seems to have taken on a life of its own (emphasis mine): In Yemen, for instance, the CIA and the military's Joint Special Operations Command pursue the same adversary with nearly identical aircraft. In other words, Jaffe is describing a system in which a decentralized apparatus carries out summary executions of people we're assured are bad and who are sometimes U.S. citizens, and the president knows about this but chooses not to exercise oversight or control of the process.
It is an absolute scandal. The Political Consequences of a Drones-First Policy - Joshua Foust - International. The global counterterrorism mission imposes substantial political costs to the U.S.
Yet policymakers are rushing ahead anyway. Why we should start thinking more about politics, and less about killing bad guys. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta speaks to the media from the Pentagon Briefing Room in Washington, DC / Reuters If you talk to any security or intelligence professional, they'll tell you that the consequences of the Arab Spring -- it turned one this week -- have been devastating to U.S. security interests in the region. Over the last year the U.S. bureaucracy has worked feverishly to reestablish itself in the MENA region. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta unveiled this week a plan to dramatically expand the use of drones and special operations as the DoD tries to figure out how to operate in a universe of limited resources.
As one example, drones carry inherent political costs to the regime that allows them. US Interventions in the World since WW II. Romney-geddon! Mitt’s Foreign Policy Team Run By Ultra-Neocon Loons & Failures Itching For Nuclear War With Iran - By Max Blumenthal. This article is cross-posted from Al-Akhbar with permission from the author Max Blumenthal.
In 2005, a group of graduate students at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced and International Studies (SAIS) participated in the school’s annual diplomatic simulation. The high-pressure scenario required the students to negotiate a resolution to a standoff with a nuclear-armed Republic of Pakistan. Mara Karlin, a student known for her hawkish politics on Israel and the Middle East, played President of the United States.
Though most of the participants were confident they could head off a military conflict with diplomatic measures, Karlin jumped the gun. According to a former SAIS student, not only did Karlin order a nuclear strike on Pakistan, she also took the opportunity to nuke Iran. Today, Cohen is among Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney’s top campaign advisers. Cohen’s extensive web of foreign policy and military connections forms a seamless line to Tel Aviv.