The FPA’s Must Reads (June 14-June 21)

Return to Auschwitz: How Israel keeps Holocaust memories alive
By Kevin Connolly
BBC News

As the years pass, the number of Holocaust survivors continues to decline at a faster and faster rate. Now Israel finds itself faced with a struggle: How to keep the next generation of Israelis informed about what happened in Europe seven decades ago, even as the number of survivors able to provide a first-hand account gets lower and lower.

The Prism
By Jill Lepore
The New Yorker

The defense of privacy never precedes, says Lepore, the proliferation of new technologies able to expose secrets. It doesn’t matter what the technology is or how it works — what holds is a fear of its ability to expose mysteries. And as new technologies arise, so too has the paradox a culture obsessed with both putting as much information out there as possible while cherishing a sense of privacy.

Why Drones Work
By Daniel Byman
Foreign Affairs

“The Obama administration relies on drones,” says Byman, “for one simple reason: they work.” Decrease in drone strikes or not, drones are likely to remain a staple of U.S. foreign policy for some time — they’re quicker, less intrusive and more effective than putting boots on the ground. Yet for all their strong points, there is a danger in relying on them too heavily, particularly signature strikes.

Booz Allen, the World’s Most Profitable Spy Organization
By Drake Bennett and Michael Riley
Businessweek

Booz, Fry, Allen & Hamilton — a consulting firm in Chicago — started its decades-long relationship with the U.S. government just one year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Booz Allen Hamilton, which split from Booz & Co., the commercial wing, in 2008, has kept a low profile for the most part, but its reach has continued to grow in the years after 9/11.

How Austerity Failed
By Martin Wolf
The New York Review of Books

In this roundup and rebuke of Europe’s austerity policies, Wolf emphasizes that the right approach to a crisis is not to cut, but to use everything in the government’s capacity to drive recovery forward. Austerity is by no means the only reason for the weak economy, but it has made it far more difficult for a weakened Europe to deal with the shocks coming from the financial crisis and the end of easy credit.

Blogs:

Al-Shabaab’s Bloody Attack in Mogadishu by Abukar Arman
Iran’s election: What it means for democracy and foreign policy by Scott Bleiweis
The Broken Intervention Calculation: Syria by Gus Constantinou
Obama’s Decision to Arm Syria’s Rebels by Scott Monje
What Susan Rice Could Learn From Former Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau by Sarwar Kashmeri