News of Iran’s intensified global search for uranium supplies has hit the wires, underscoring the need for the IAEA to get its nuclear fuel bank up and running. The Agency received the final green light it needed when its Board of Governors approved a proposal by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) to establish a bank […]
This is my maiden post for the Foreign Policy Association, so I thought I’d briefly introduce myself and share some thoughts about what I hope to accomplish with my blog posts for FPA. I have served in various capacities in and around the Washington, D.C. policy community over the last twenty years or so, where […]
There’s been a story brewing for a couple weeks about a lawsuit against Jimmy Carter and Simon & Schuster, who published Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The plaintiffs in this $5 million lawsuit claim that the book should not be classified as non-fiction because they dispute some of the Carter’s assertions. As Kevin Jon […]
Joshua Pollack at Arms Control Wonk predicts that the IAEA is preparing to refer the Syria situation to the UN Security Council. The situation has been strange since it began in September 2007, when Israel bombed a suspected nuclear facility in Syria. The initial Syrian response was to denounce the Israeli violation of Syria’s sovereignty […]
The sequence of events that occurred on February 15th and ended in the murder of ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata and in the shooting of Special Agent Victor Avila are as follows–evidence that the attack on two US federal agents was premeditated and planned, not a case of ‘being in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ or an incident triggered by the desire of the assailants to hijack a valuable vehicle.
President Obama has promised Zapata’s family that the US government will spare no effort to bring the Mexican gunman responsible for the attack to justice, and Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, has express outrage, declaring “The full resources of our department are at the disposal of our Mexican partners in this investigation.”
Given the dearth of substantive press coverage on both side of the border, and the muted attitude of US officials toward Mexico’s efforts to curb drug trafficking and cartel violence over the past five years—during which roughly 38,000 people have been killed, including scores of US citizens—the vocalization of even these stylized objections is noteworthy.
In my first post about Egypt, I noted the view articulated by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, that in revolutions, the members of the army and/or the police force are the ones who decide what happens. If the government loses control of its coercive forces, the revolution succeeds. So the question we, and […]
True, the Mubarak regime was authoritarian and at times brutal with its domestic opponents; true, Mubarak squandered opportunities over three decades to gradually introduce pluralism and democracy. But, compared to other such regimes, was it so bad, especially from the American perspective? Why were Western governments so eager to topple him, yet still tiptoe around the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or his […]
Been traveling this past week so have not had time to blog but wanted to do an update on Egypt. After apparently losing the support of the military and facing continuing demonstrations, President Mubarak has stepped down and turned over all power to his Vice President, Vice President Omar Suleiman. According to a New York […]
Some people on the right are trying to do to same thing with Egyptian democracy promotion that they’ve done with the International Criminal Court (ICC) – fallaciously argue that Obama’s policy has been drastically different than that of Bush. From Clifford May at the National Review: …[T]he fact is that Bush did push for democratic […]
I have admired Barack Obama for some time, but since early in the 2008 Democratic primaries, I have written that his Achilles’ heel is his hubris. It is his strength, for sure, propelling a charismatic politician with little experience (especially on foreign policy) into the White House. But it can be his undoing. On […]
Though the Egyptian government met with some opposition leaders over the weekend, the divide between them remains large. This is especially true when we look at how they want to deal with Egypt’s constitution. Mubarak wants to reform the current constitution. As he said in his Feb. 2 speech (in which he announced his decision […]
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