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U.S. Army / Ted Green
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By William Pfaff — The Afghanistan situation is worth analysis at two levels, that of the war itself and the domestic political effect of Obama’s misguided decision to replace “Bush’s war” in Iraq with his own in Afghanistan.
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By William Pfaff — In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the major places of military interest to the United States today, there are indications that things are coming apart.
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By William Pfaff — The lesson of modern European history—the world wars and the great totalitarian convulsions—is that trying to create a utopia invites disaster.
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By William Pfaff — Even though Barack Obama writes that America cannot allow the burdens of the 21st century to “fall on American shoulders alone,” he similarly cannot accept that the United States deviate from the globalist ambitions emphasized in the published strategies of both the Bush and Obama administrations.
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By William Pfaff — The conduct of Barack Obama in the BP affair, and all that preceded it, has become to this writer all but incomprehensible. I cannot imagine a more compelling portrayal of impotence.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By William Pfaff — Though the president reiterated his promise of success, the future he outlined at West Point is hard to distinguish from what we have already been through in Iraq, with less than reassuring results.
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By William Pfaff — The European Union doesn’t know where it stands at this moment. NATO thinks it knows and is gambling.
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By William Pfaff — The present crisis of the European Union was inherent in the creation of the institution itself.
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By William Pfaff — Large and firmly implanted bureaucratic organizations are almost impossible to kill, even when they have no reason to continue to exist, as NATO has not since the Soviet Union, communism and the Warsaw Pact all collapsed.
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By William Pfaff — It is a dismaying reflection that the facilitators of major violence thus far in the 21st century have been lies told by democratic governments.
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By William Pfaff — The specific inspiration for weapons proliferation among vulnerable Third World states is the desire to have a nuclear deterrent against invasion or attack by the United States (or in the Iran case, Israel), or by some other nation in the future.
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By William Pfaff — Today’s European crisis was precipitated by Greece acting with possibly reckless honesty, and Germany behaving badly.
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By William Pfaff — I would think one judgment history will make on the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council (1962-65), under Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, will be a reproach for its failure to lift the rule of celibacy for secular priests.
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By William Pfaff — The relationship between the United States and Israel has always rested on a number of pretensions, politically useful to politicians on both sides, but because they are untrue, certain eventually to prove destructive to both countries.
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By William Pfaff — Internationally speaking, there are only two subjects to talk about in the Middle East. These are Israel, the Palestinians and the Americans; and Iran and Israel.
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By William Pfaff — There is a lot of money to be made by big international banks in impoverished small, and even medium-size, countries in times of world crisis.
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By William Pfaff — The U.S. devotes large sums of money to subsidizing the participation in Afghanistan of small NATO countries and publicizing the affair as a true coalition operation, but NATO-nation political and public support for the war is faint and grudging because few believe the mission is realistic.
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By William Pfaff — What is this problem about Europe’s standing in the world today that obsesses the Europeans and generates constant self-examination, endless academic seminars and political conferences, all permeated with inarticulate anxiety?
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White House / Pete Souza
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By William Pfaff — China and India stopped being part of what was called the “third world” when the “second world,” the communist world, disappeared in a shattering of global illusions in 1989.
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By William Pfaff — President Obama’s failures in Israel and elsewhere abroad have astonished the international public and left in despair those Americans who can scarcely believe that a whole year has been irresponsibly wasted.
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U.S. Navy / Photographer's Mate 3rd Class Tyler J. Clements
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By William Pfaff — A new book inspired by liberal disappointment with President Barack Obama blames the atomic bomb for America’s misadventures. This strikes me as interesting but completely wrong.
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White House / Samantha Appleton
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By William Pfaff — President Barack Obama is said to feel he is in trouble politically because his enemies in Congress and among the Washington journalists who decide what the “mood” of Washington is on any given day say he is not tough enough.
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U.S. Air Force / Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison
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By William Pfaff — It is not widely understood that the policy objective of al-Qaida is not to attack Western countries, but to bring about an upheaval in the Islamic world in which Islam can be rescued from corrupted governments and degenerate practices.
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By William Pfaff — Iran appears to be in the throes of popular uprising, yet the U.S. and Israel continue to flirt with military intervention for dubious reasons.
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By William Pfaff — Will Christmas in America end up like Christmas in Japan, or Halloween in France? That is to say, a merchandising opportunity that eventually flopped.
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AP
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By William Pfaff — The immense crowds gathering in Iran identify either a pre-revolutionary situation or political decadence suggesting that the end may be near, but might also be very bad.
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U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Efren Lopez
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By William Pfaff — Both Barack Obama and George W. Bush were saying in different ways that we Americans are good and Taliban or jihadists are bad. But the reason we are good is that we are we, and we are justified in punishing them because they are they.
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Staff Sgt. Cohen A. Young, U.S. Air Force
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By William Pfaff — The people who are running the war in Afghanistan are contemplating an air attack on one of Pakistan’s principal cities, the capital of its largest province, for reasons that defy logic.
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By William Pfaff — Economist Joseph Stiglitz says the International Monetary Fund should create a new reserve currency, rather like declaring that a massive gold mine has been discovered under the IMF building.
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By William Pfaff — Why, if the electorate is less than enthusiastic about providing global underwriting, and would like to see others provide their own insurance, does Washington persist in its role?
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White House / Lawrence Jackson
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By William Pfaff — There was much disappointment on Tuesday night about Barack Obama’s decision to widen the war in Afghanistan, but there can have been no real surprise.
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By William Pfaff — It seems plausible that payback time has arrived for the international financial community. The principal obstacle here is, at the moment, the Obama administration.
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By William Pfaff — With Vietnam, John F. Kennedy counted on the fact that one of the most effective ways to take a decision is to postpone it until it no longer is relevant. This is what Barack Obama has been able to do until now.
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Modified from an archival White House photo by David Morse
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama has made a welcome change to the presidency, dropping the praetorian guard that used to flank his predecessor at every opportunity.
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U.S. Army / Sgt. Matthew Moeller
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By William Pfaff — The best way to deal with an insurrection is not to go in the first place. The second-best way is to get out as quickly and gracefully as possible.
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By William Pfaff — When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Pakistan this week, she will hear a lot about how fearful the Pakistan populace is, not of the Taliban and al-Qaida, but of the United States.
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By William Pfaff — Other than the United States, Turkey has probably been the most important of Israel’s allies, but now it is getting the “freedom fries” treatment.
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By William Pfaff — What could and should have been celebrated this week in Beijing is the resumption of effective power in the People’s Republic by the modernizer Deng Xiaoping.
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By William Pfaff — While the Republican leadership in the United States would have people believe that the country is being remorselessly driven to the far left under Barack Obama, European voters are moving toward the right.
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By William Pfaff — God’s specific instruction to the Jewish people to reoccupy Jerusalem and the Palestinian West Bank stands in the way of peace, but President Obama must get results—and fast—before the situation deteriorates.
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By William Pfaff — President Barack Obama’s cancellation of his predecessor’s missile-defense scheme for Poland and the Czech Republic presumably brings to a close one of the least explicable and most dangerous American policy initiatives since the Cold War officially ended.
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U.S. Army / Sgt. Teddy Wade
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By William Pfaff — The more one hears the discussion among Democrats about the war in Afghanistan, the more one feels that it is a serious handicap that Barack Obama has no personal experience of international relations or of foreign policy or military service.
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By William Pfaff — Since the 1970s, the nation has been in a dizzying downward spin in the effective purchase of public office by corporations.
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By William Pfaff — Instead of reading ecology and novels on his vacation, the president should read Charles de Gaulle, who ended the dreadful insurrection in Algeria. Obama and his advisers have a dramatic and ahistorical view of Afghanistan—that “There is no alternative to victory.”
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By William Pfaff — Thus far in the torture debate that has gone on in the United States since 2001, I can think of only one high American government figure currently in office taking a stand on torture in terms of justice, honor and national integrity.
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USMC / Lance Cpl. Phillip Elgie
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By William Pfaff — The problem with U.S.-sponsored elections in the non-Western world, as in Afghanistan on Thursday, is that they seek to legitimize America’s presence in the country, where it is typically not wanted.
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AP / Jae C. Hong
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By William Pfaff — The president is simply too decent to get the job done. His advisers never learn from their mistakes and the American public is intolerant and hasn’t a clue as to what really is going on in the world.
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By William Pfaff — Little mainstream comment seems to have appeared on the latest revelations of incompetence and sadistic fantasy that have been published this week about the ways in which the American nation lost its honor and international reputation because of the Bush administration’s infatuation with torture.
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USMC / Staff Sgt. William Greeson
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By William Pfaff — It would be a great service to the American nation if Barack Obama would tell us what he himself thinks the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are about.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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