Mahler's Prodigal Son

Professor Stephen Walt holds a chair in international relations at Harvard. He has a blog on FP in which he comments on current events, etc. etc. In his latest posting " What the appointment of Hagel means and doesn't mean " he reflects on the Obama appointment - that is, subject to Senate approval - of John Kerry and Chuck Hagel as Secretaries of State and Defence respectively. "First, as I noted a week or so ago, I don't think Hagel's appointment implies any shift in policy direction. It's been clear for quite some time what the general thrust of Obama's national security policy is going to be: trimming defense, pivoting to Asia, rejecting preventive war with Iran, and striving to rebuild at home. To the extent that he used the sword overseas, it was through limited, surgical means like special forces and drones and not big U.S. deployments. (The Afghan surge is the exception, of course, but I think Obama learned his lesson on that one)....

TomDispatch has a piece in which he notes the imminent release of a what is said to be a definitive book about the Vietnam War......and in the process of the piece, reference is made to the now infamous My Lai massacre, and not unimportantly, the myriad of atrocities which, all too sadly, and to their shame, the Americans have been involved in since the Vietnam War. "In late December 2001, not long after Washington’s second Afghan War began, there was that wedding celebration in eastern Afghanistan in which 110 of 112 villagers were reportedly killed by American B-52 and B-1B bombers using precision guided weapons. Then there were the more than 40 Iraqi wedding celebrants (27 from one extended family, including 14 children) who died when U.S. planes struck their party at a village near the Syrian border back in May 2004, and the Afghan bridal party of 70 to 90 who were taken out by a U.S. airstrike on a road near the Pakistani border in July 2008. (The bride and 46 of those...

That Greece is in deep economic turmoil is to state nothing new. It's headache economy, with all that entails, is seemingly destined to continue for a considerable time. What is often unsaid, is to reflect on the reasons for Greece's problems. An op-ed piece " Greece's Rotten Oligarchy " in The New York Times explains things. "Democracy is like a bicycle: if you don’t keep pedaling, you fall. Unfortunately, the bicycle of Greek democracy has long been broken. After the military junta collapsed in 1974, Greece created only a hybrid, diluted form of democracy. You can vote, belong to a party and protest. In essence, however, a small clique exercises all meaningful political power. For all that has been said about the Greek crisis, much has been left unsaid. The crisis has become a battleground of interests and ideologies. At stake is the role of the public sector and the welfare state. Yes, in Greece we have a dysfunctional public sector; for the pas...

Australia took its seat on the UN Security Council - for a 2 year term - on 1 January. In the context of exploring the range of issues Australia's diplomats will face in 2103 alone, a firmer Oz diplomat, Bruce Haigh, writing for Crikey, identifies the myriad of "problems" likely to be on the Council's agenda. It's a formidable list - and shows what a "world" we live in that there are so many issues to contend with. " The issues facing the UN Security Council are substantial, with the Middle East requiring close focus and some tough decisions. At the top of the list is Syria, which is bringing into play NATO with the deployment of patriot missiles to Turkey. The rabid regime has caused a refugee humanitarian crisis in neighbouring countries. Instability stalks the region, whilst Israel pours fuel on the fire with further settlements on Palestinian land and a hatred of Hamas, apparently precluding negotiations. Egypt is struggling with a de...

We are by now all too familiar with the so-called "war on terror". It has manifested itself in a myriad of ways in or through our daily lives. Governments around the world have adopted all manner of methods in curbing liberties, or taking liberties, in the way they have acted, all in the name of the now euphemistic "war on terror". Glenn Greenwald, writing in The Guardian , rightly poses the question of how much longer can this "war on terror" be allowed to continue. In October, the Washington Post's Greg Miller reported that the administration was instituting a "disposition matrix" to determine how terrorism suspects will be disposed of, all based on this fact: "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade ." As Miller puts it: "That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once...

It now seems almost beyond any doubt that we are all experiencing climate change in one way or another. Yet, there is little or no action on the part of governments to counter or even take positive steps to address the issue. Why? It's a question posed in this piece from Inter Press Service . "Current emission reduction commitments by countries are not nearly enough, likely to result in emissions of about 55Gt in 2020, studies estimate. Despite knowing this and knowing 11 of the last 12 years were the warmest ever measured, countries refused to increase their reduction targets at the most recent United Nations climate conference in Doha last December. An extremely wealthy and powerful fossil fuel industry is behind this political failure to act. Just like the tobacco industry before them, the fossil energy industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars on misinformation about climate change and lobbyists to fight against any action to reduce fossil fuel use. Their o...

Ilan Pappe is an Israeli scholar and author who has written extensively on Israel. It is his research and publication of how Israel conducted itself during the 1948 War - none of it flattering to Israel at all and contrary to the myth perpetrated down the years - which has led to him being accused of being a self-hating Jew, anti-Zionist, etc. The usual offensive epithets - without in itself challenging what Pappe says. In a piece written for The Electronic Intifada , Pappe questions whether one can have compassion for Israel in 2013. I have just spent the last few days of 2012 in the city of Haifa. Accidentally, I met a few of my acquaintances who in the past deemed me at best as deluded and at worst as a traitor. They seemed more embarrassed today — almost confessing that mine and my friends’ worst predictions about Israel’s future seemed to be materializing painfully in front of their very eyes. In fact, our predictions came very late in the day. Already in 1950, with unset...