Entries Tagged 'International Affairs' ↓

that a leader is dead than the denials. Well today we have a whopper: Doctors Deny Reports of Arafat’s Death.

Update: Arafat actually held on for a lot longer than expected, but now (Nov 11) he has finally slipped out of his coma. Any prognostications on the what this means for the future of the region would be wild speculation at this point.

has published a post with an extended quote from his own article in The Atlantic this summer that very clearly makes the distinction between the two foreign policy stances at play in this election. I wonder if John Robb has a reaction to this. Unfortunately for me I haven’t been following his site closely enough of late.

My own view is that non-state actors and others outside the state system were some of the prime movers, though often hidden, behind most if not all of the battles of the latter period of the Cold War. The fighting occurred within the context of the state system, with one side or the other jockeying for control of one of the dozens of proxies for either the US or the Soviet Union, but that doesn’t mean it was just an extension of earlier state-centric battles. Just because groups were coopted by one side or the other doesn’t obviate the fact that there were a lot of non-state actors of great - primary -significance. Iran-Contra, Afghanistan in the Soviet era, the rise of narco-terrorists in Columbia and elsewhere in Central America - all of these involved non-state actors and weren’t primarily about a state per se but much more diffuse control and power issues. You might say I agree with the Democratic vision as expressed in the article and would take the analysis even further.

Weapons Inspector for Iraq has produced his report - remember David Kay’s report wasn’t good enough for this administration - and it goes from bad to worse. According to the Washington Post, the report discounts the Iraqi arms threat and that Saddam wanted WMDs, but had no concrete plans or program to develop them.

comes a choice quote by Dick Cheney: “And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait [in 1991], but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq…” Read the whole quote in The Australian.

to omit controversial sources that might be blocked from it’s Chinese Google News service. In other words, they condone the Chinese government’s blocking of those sites. Worse, though, they have tried to explain it away as a usability issue on the Google Blog.

Let’s just get this straight. Website usability does NOT provide cover for a company to go out of its way to condone the censorship conducted by an authoritarian, single-party-state government.

“a vote for Bush is a vote for the Islamic Revolution.”