Archives for 2009

The Pakistani Taliban are not going to take over the Pakistani government. That worry doesn’t keep me up at night. They are small, and operate in a rugged, remote area of the country. They can set off bombs and be a destabilizing force. But a few thousand tribesmen can’t take over a country of 165 […]

George W. Bush set stem cell research back 8 years and violated the principle of the separation of church and state by issuing what was essentially executive-branch legislation that imposed on a whole country Bush’s religious views. Bush’s move had no principle of popular sovereignty behind it. And likely he didn’t even really believe the […]

The Obama administration will not replace two US brigades (12,000 troops) that are departing Iraq. There are 140,000 US troops in that country, down from 160,000 in 2008 during the Bush troop escalation or “surge.” The two brigades will likely be brought out of al-Anbar Province and Baghdad. Al-Anbar, once one of the most violent […]

In an interview in the New York Times, President Barack Obama admitted that the US is not winning in Afghanistan. He also allowed that it might be possible for the US to peel off and negotiate with more moderate elements of the Taliban, though he admitted that Afghanistan is more complex than Iraq and that […]

Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt, who blogs for Foreign Policy takes on the critics of Chas Freeman’s possible appointment as chair of the National Intelligence Council, and critics of Walt for defending him. Freeman is a man of enormous diplomatic experience, both a China expert and a Middle East hand, and is the former US […]

In the Obama administration’s first formal overture to Iran, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday that Iran might be invited to an international conference on Afghanistan scheduled for March 31. In 2001, Iran proved helpful to the US war on the Taliban, but Neoconservatives David Frum and Richard Perle deliberately stopped the movement toward […]

A car bomb at a livestock market in Babi province near the city of Hilla . The blast left 12 dead. Babil is majority Shiite but has a Sunni minority. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani met Thursday in Najaf with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sistani is said to have expressed […]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton slammed Israel on Wednesday for its plan to demolish 88 Palestinian homes in Occupied East Jerusalem, calling it a violation of the Roadmap for Israeli-Palestinian peace. She said after meeting Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, “Clearly this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into […]

Guerrillas in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday subjected a US military base to a barrage of mortar fire, killing a US soldier. The guerrillas successfully targeted a mililtary counter-insurgency office intended to deal with the guerrillas. That move shows that they have infiltrated the base and have someone on the inside telling them […]