On August 30th, U.S. Senator Barack Obama wrote on op-ed for the New York Daily News about the need to confront the challenge posed by Iran. He goes on to make some valid observations: the Iranian government does present a strategic challenge to the US, the war in Iraq severely limits American policy options throughout [...]
Roguely Stated
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Russian Cooperation Needed to Achieve Nuclear Security
In Tuesday’s Washington Post, David E Hoffman writes about U.S. Senator Richard Lugar’s and former Senator Sam Nunn’s efforts to secure the world’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons with the help of Russia. Nunn, the current co-chairman of the non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative, expressed concern about the recent dispute with Russia over U.S. plans to [...]
Evaluating “The Surge”
Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, will brief Congress on September 11th regarding the situation on the ground in Iraq according to Think Progress. FP’s Passport notes the highly unusual timing of the briefing: Nothing says “we need to continue the surge” like reminding Americans that Saddam planned 9/11. Somewhere, Karl Rove [...]
Nuclear Nonproliferation Update
Joseph Cirincione, the director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress and Uri Leventer, a graduate student at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, have written an op-ed for the International Herald Tribune on the growing “nuclear renaissance” in the Middle East. They conclude that the unprecedented demand for nuclear programs [...]
Reviving U.S. Global Influence
In Sunday’s edition of Knoxnews.com, Thomas P.M. Barnett writes about Senator Obama’s recent comments regarding his willingness to talk with America’s enemies, as well as, what Barnett believes to be Obama’s larger point: that America needs to “reach out to the rest of the world again”. On issue after issue, the international community comes together [...]
China’s Economic “Nuclear Option”
Mike Boyer writes today on FP’s Passport that the U.S. economy just might be facing the economic equivalent of a nuclear holocaust. The story was first reported in the British newspaper the Telegraph: The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast [...]
NSA Wiretapping Program Expands
On Sunday, President Bush signed the Protect America Act into law. This legislation gives the National Security Agency expanded authority to intercept phone calls and e-mails of foreigners and, under some circumstances, American citizens. According to the Boston Globe, the new law “carves out a broad exemption from a 1978 law that requires the government [...]
Preventing Genocide: not a reason to use military force?
Recently, the Boston Herald published an Associated Press report where Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama reportedly stated “…the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there”. “Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which [...]
Measuring Success in Iraq: Is the U.S. Military Using the Wrong “Metrics”?
In a recent briefing, General Peter Pace, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had this to say regarding the latest U.S. military surge and counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts: “If you try to define this in terms of level of violence, you’ve really put yourself on the wrong metric. It isn’t about X number [...]
Racial Equality and National Security: The Alarming Decline of Black Americans in the US Military
Lolita C. Baldor of the Associated Press has explored an important, but under-appreciated national security issue for the Washington Post recently concerning the declining number of blacks joining the U.S. military. According to Pentagon data on both reserve and active duty forces, there was a 38 percent decline in recruitment of black Americans between 2001 [...]
Committing U.S. Military Personnel to Africa Permanently
“A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military’s new frontier outpost.” In this month’s Esquire magazine, Thomas P.M. Barnett writes [...]
DoD “exceeded limits” in employing interrogation techniques
The DoD has officially acknowledged that many of the most controversial detention and interrogation techniques “exceeded the limits established in Army Field Manual 34-52, Intelligence Interrogation” and in fact were borrowed from an Army survival training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (or SERE for short). SERE was designed to train US military personnel how [...]