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By Juan Cole
$25.60
By Christopher Caldwell
$19.80
$35
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smh.com.au
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After an uninspiring scoreless draw with fellow autocratic state Saudi Arabia, it seems that North Korea’s football (soccer) team has managed to qualify for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The qualification raises the possibility of a cup confrontation with South Korea—or even the U.S.—next summer.
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By William Pfaff — The West was wrong about this being a war of civilizations, and so were the Muslims. Islamic civilization is experiencing a double crisis, of modernity and of religion. Nothing could be clearer today in Tehran.
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AP photo / Ben Curtis
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By Scott Ritter — The protests in Iran have captured the imagination of Western media, but the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should come as no surprise. The world needs to move past the controversy of the Iranian elections and, like him or not, find a way to deal with President Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions.
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Wikimedia Commons
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By Chris Hedges — This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.
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A provocative new book, “One State, Two States,” by revisionist Israeli historian Benny Morris breaks a taboo by asking whether anti-Zionism has become the anti-imperialism of fools. Can his polemic act as the ax that helps break up the frozen and brittle nature of a debate over the seemingly intractable war between Palestinians and Jews?
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By Eugene Robinson — Obama should be applauded for taking climate change seriously, but one of his administration’s centerpiece initiatives may be digging a very expensive dry hole—literally.
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USAF / Staff Sgt. Bradley A. Lail
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By Fred Branfman — Gen. David Petraeus has proven the rule that past military victories do not guarantee future success. The general has made a mess of Afghanistan and Pakistan, yet he remains dangerously popular.
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Mr. Fish
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China takes a lot of heat for being too buddy-buddy with North Korea, but if the harsh words in one of the middle kingdom’s tabloids are any indication, Beijing is none too happy with Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions. “This is an unprecedented threat that China has never faced in its thousands of years,” says a writer in the Global Times, a People’s Daily spinoff.
Posted on Jun 1, 2009
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twitter.com / kcna_dprk
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Sure, Obama and McCain (well, actually their staffs) joined micro-blogging site Twitter for propaganda purposes. But now the nuke-happy and secretive North Koreans are getting in on the Web 2.0 revolution, offering an interesting state-controlled glimpse into the isolated country.
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Petar Pismestrovic, Kleine Zeitung, Austria —
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By William Pfaff — The basic question is whether the United States wishes to treat Russia as a permanent enemy, even if it is not. The result of treating states as enemies is that sooner or later they become them.
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AP photo / B.K. Bangash
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President Barack Obama and his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari, will have a lot to talk about when Zardari visits the White House on Wednesday, what with al-Qaida and the Taliban stirring up trouble of late and sparking concerns over the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
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The debate over our 40th president’s role in ending the Cold War continues with the publication of James Mann’s “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan.”
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White House / David Bohrer
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Ever the fan of cherry-picking, former Vice President Dick Cheney has called for the declassification of select intelligence he claims would polish his torture legacy. Whistle-blower extraordinaire Joe Wilson says the “most secretive individual in American politics” shouldn’t stop there—why not air all of the Bush administration’s dirty laundry once and for all?
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a.abcnews.com
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In a move that strains the already delicate ties between Tehran and Washington, Iran has sentenced Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi to eight years in jail for allegedly spying for the U.S. government.
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AP photo / Ahn Young-joon
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By Scott Ritter — North Korea has come under strong international criticism and sanctions for its missile launch, but as a signatory to the 1966 Outer Space Treaty, it is legally permitted to pursue space launch activity. Besides, where is the pandemonium when Japan, Pakistan, Israel, India, Russia and the U.S. refine, test and launch their own ballistic missiles?
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By William Pfaff — If Obama is successful in reducing our nuclear stockpile, it could make a monumental difference to the world’s security. Nuclear arms proliferation will never be stopped so long as the U.S. insists on maintaining a privileged position of global nuclear domination.
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Not to let North Korea hog the nuclear spotlight, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad presided over the opening of a nuclear fuel facility on Thursday. With Vulcan flair, he declared, “The Iranian nation has from the beginning been after logic and negotiations, but negotiations based on justice and complete respect for rights and regulations.”
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White House / Pete Souza
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The U.S. led a round of chest-thumping following North Korea’s alleged missile test Sunday, but President Obama also acknowledged that the United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons against others and, as such, has a “moral responsibility” to lead the world toward a nuclear stockpile of zero.
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AP photo / Lee Jin-man
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The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting following what North Korea described as a satellite launch but what the U.S. and South Korea said was actually a long-range missile test. The U.S., the European Union, Japan and South Korea have all weighed in with varying degrees of concern, while China and Russia have urged calm and restraint.
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By William Pfaff — The Thirty Years’ War occupies little space in the school texts of the English-speaking world, but its futility comes to mind when Richard Holbrooke speaks of the war he is supposed to manage, now the Af-Pak war.
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AP photo / Elizabeth Dalziel
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By Scott Ritter — Forget about terrorism for a moment. The potential catastrophe that climate change could unleash on America makes every other national security crisis pale in comparison. President Obama cannot secure the homeland without addressing this global emergency.
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By William Pfaff — NATO today, approaching its 60th birthday, faces the prospect of sending home all of its units not willing to fight in Afghanistan under the American flag. They will go home to “defend” Europe. From whom?
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AP pool photo / Aleksey Nikolskyi
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By Scott Ritter — The president must be getting bad advice. Why else would he offer not to build a missile defense system he doesn’t want in exchange for Russia’s help with an Iranian nuclear weapons program that doesn’t exist?
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AP photo / Andy Wong
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By Chris Hedges — All efforts to save the planet will be useless if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people, according to a recent U.N. forecast. And yet studies, books and documentaries that deal with various crises fail to discuss the danger of all those billions of hungry people looking for a better life.
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AP photo / Hasan Sarbakhshian
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By Chris Hedges — Bibi Netanyahu’s assumption of power in Israel sets the stage for a huge campaign by the Israeli government, and its well-oiled lobby groups in Washington, to push us into a war with Iran, but a stable relationship with Iran would do more to protect Israel and our interests in the Middle East.
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Wikimedia Commons
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John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, joins the podcast with a status report on the spread of nuclear weapons. Cutting a deal with Iran and North Korea while getting the U.S. and Russia to downsize their own arsenals won’t be easy, but it may be only a matter of time—and diplomacy.
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By William Pfaff — Except for the brief NATO intervention in Kosovo and Serbia, all of the significant U.S. military expeditions since the Cold War have been fought against Asians, and we have lost nearly all of them.
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By Ellen Goodman — After the collapse of trust in every sort of expert—after lenders financed houses for people who couldn’t afford them, bankers created systems they couldn’t even describe and, finally, we hear, Bernie Madoff ripped off even his high school friends—there is a residue of resilience.
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AP photo / Musa Khan
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In a rebuke to U.S. interests in the region and amid growing tensions between two nuclear powers, Pakistan is moving its forces from its border with Afghanistan—where Pakistani troops are fighting against the Taliban—and restricting soldiers from going on leave, as fears of conflict with India continue to grow.
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One of JFK’s “best and brightest” died wondering how the Vietnam War could have gone so wrong. Now, in an important new book, we have some answers.
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Wikimedia Commons / Fastfission
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North Korea and the U.S. have agreed to the broad strokes of a nuclear disarmament deal, but hammering out the details is proving to be a monumental challenge. U.S. envoy Christopher Hill announced Thursday that talks were essentially on ice. It may or may not help that Kim Jong Il has been missing in action for months.
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By William Pfaff — The evidence suggests that American policy under Barack Obama will be a continuation of the neoconservative foreign policy of the Bush administration, given a human face.
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Wikimedia Commons / Fastfission (altered)
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A month too late for Halloween, a congressionally mandated independent panel has come to this terrifying conclusion: “Unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.” Boo!
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By William Pfaff — The cynical view of national sovereignty holds that it belongs only to those who can defend it. This was said recently at the Pentagon concerning American manned and unmanned attacks inside Pakistan.
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AP photo / Hasan Sarbakhshian
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By Scott Ritter — Now that the presidential election has liberated Barack Obama from the need to play to the fickle whim of domestic politics, he should put away the saber and take a more enlightened approach to Iran.
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A Russian navy submarine propelled by nuclear power was heading back to port during a test run in the Sea of Japan when the fire-extinguishing system was accidentally activated near the sub’s bow, killing over 20 people and injuring at least 21 others aboard.
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By William Pfaff — The real issues of the American presidential election are the future of the economy and the future of American foreign policy. The one seems already settled. The second seems to unite John McCain and Barack Obama in support of a program doomed to fail.
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Collage: AP photo / Chip Somodevilla, pool / Wikimedia Commons
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James G. Blight and janet M. Lang —
The leading issue in the current face-off between Barack Obama and John McCain is the economy. Once elected and inaugurated, however, a U.S. president’s politics become global literally overnight.
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By William Pfaff — There are only two real issues left in the foreign policy debate between John McCain and Barack Obama. Yet neither the Iraq nor the Afghanistan issue is within the power of any American president to resolve.
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By William Pfaff — Less apparent to most people than the economic crisis, but just as real, are the signs of an impending crash of an American military system in which, since the end of the Cold War, Pentagon dysfunction has metastasized so uncontrollably as to scandalize the men who have overseen it.
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While Americans from the president on down were preoccupied with the financial meltdown, the disarmament deal with North Korea was quietly falling apart. Actually, talks with the nuclear hermit state have been on the rocks for some time, and have only grown more complicated since Kim Jong Il went MIA.
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Carolyn Eisenberg takes a close look at Melvyn Leffler’s “For the Soul of Mankind” to ask whether our current troubles are rooted in a history that continues to haunt us.
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topnews.in
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Although she acknowledged that Georgia fired the first shots in August’s bloody conflict with Russia, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday laid most of the blame for that showdown on Russia. During a strident speech, she also gave several other examples of how she believed Russia’s leaders were taking their nation down a dangerous road.
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White House / David Bohrer
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How far was Dick Cheney (above) willing to go to get his war in Iraq? Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, quoted in Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman’s new book, says the vice president hoodwinked him during a one-on-one meeting in the Capitol.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Rumors are flying after the North Korean dictator skipped a parade in honor of the country’s 60th anniversary. A U.S. intelligence official said Kim apparently “suffered a health setback, potentially a stroke.” Or he could be fine. News travels slow out of the hermit kingdom.
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By William Pfaff — NATO has now been broken because it was used by the United States and the European NATO members as a tool for expanding Western power into the Russian “near abroad,” and after that, to make an inexplicably rash and dangerous effort to break into and split off portions of the Russian empire as it existed in the 19th century—long before the Soviet Union existed.
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The Beijing Olympics are proof that the rule of China’s Communist Party has been validated. Yet human rights abuses continue. What’s really going on? What kind of country is China becoming? Two new books help provide answers.
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By William Pfaff — When large and powerful countries intervene in the affairs of smaller countries, they take for granted that they are, or should be—and certainly could be—in control. The reverse is often true.
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Does Anything Change in Los Angeles With Election of New Mayor?
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