The war in Afghanistan is a war in which whatever the United States does now, or that President Obama does now, both the United States and Obama will lose. The country and its president are in a situation of perfect lockjaw.
The modern Olympics are supposed to be about two things: promoting peace around the world by non-violent competition that is above politics, and exalting athletic achievement. No doubt most athletes enter Olympic competition with the latter in mind. But promoting peace seems to be about the last thing on the minds of the governments whose support for their national athletic structures has always been crucial to the success of their national participants.
Iran is back in the forefront of public diplomacy. President Obama, jointly with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, held a press conference in which they seemed to give Iran one more ultimatum: conform to their demands, what they called the demands of the “international community,” by December of this year or face new sanctions. Obama said that Iran is “breaking the rule that all nations must follow.”
In the last few weeks, there has been a marked increase of calls, coming from both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, for some kind of early “exit strategy” from Afghanistan. This is coming at the very moment that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are about to recommend formally to President Obama an increase in U.S. troop commitments there.
Nothing is certain, but the general expectation is that Obama will agree to this. After all, during the elections, Obama had said that he considered U.S. intervention in Iraq a mistake and wanted an early withdrawal. One of the reasons he gave was that it had prevented sending enough troops into Afghanistan. This was a version of the “bad war, good war” concept. Iraq was a “bad” war, Afghanistan a “good” one.
There is a firestorm ahead in the Middle East for which neither the U.S. government nor the U.S. public is prepared. They seem scarcely aware how close it is on the horizon or how ferocious it will be. The U.S. government (and therefore almost inevitably the U.S. public) is deluding itself massively about its capacity to handle the situation in terms of its stated objectives. The storm will go from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Israel/Palestine, and in the classic expression “it will spread like wildfire.”
At least since the 1990s, if not longer, a major and very public concern of the United States (and to a slightly lesser extent western Europe) has been the prospect of North Korea remaining and Iran becoming a nuclear power.
The only serious debate within the U.S. government has been on the tactics to use to achieve the objective of stripping both countries of any potential to be nuclear powers. The hard-liners have argued that both regimes are dissembling, have always been dissembling, and fully intend to achieve the objective of becoming established nuclear powers. This group has therefore advocated the use, sooner rather than later, of hard action against the regimes – if necessary military action.
The recent elections in Iran, and the subsequent challenges to their legitimacy, have been a matter of enormous internal conflict in Iran, and of seemingly endless debate in the rest of the world – a debate that threatens to linger for some time yet. One of its most fascinating consequences has been the deep divisions [...]
The presidency of George W. Bush was the moment of the greatest electoral sweep of left-of-center political parties in Latin America in the last two centuries. The presidency of Barack Obama risks being the moment of the revenge of the right in Latin America.
The reason may well be the same – the combination of the [...]
For the past few weeks, the world’s attention has been fixed on Iran, where there has been much public unrest about the contested presidential elections. It now seems fairly clear that Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad will be sworn in as the next president of Iran with the full backing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. President Barack Obama has [...]
Now that President Obama has put his weight so openly and publicly behind the concept of a two-state “solution” for the Israel-Palestine controversy/struggle, such a “solution” may well be achieved in the coming years. The reason is simple. Stated abstractly, such a solution has overwhelming support in world political opinion. Polls show a majority of [...]