News Abroad

America's First Foreign Invasion: It Didn't Go So Well Either

by William Loren Katz

Some 167 years ago United States Army, Marine and Navy units were engaged in an occupation and pacification of dangerous foes in Florida. The first foreign invasion launched by the new U.S. government began in 1816 and met fierce and prolonged resistance from the multicultural Seminole nation. Part of three Seminole wars lasting to 1858, this “Second Seminole war” was the most cataclysmic Indian conflict in history. It cost taxpayers $40,000,000 (pre-Civil War dollars!), at times ti

Will Elections Make a Difference in Iraq?

by Mark LeVine

Since September 11 it has become a commonplace that religious extremism, particularly of the Muslim kind, lies at the heart of the problems that seemingly condemn the Muslim majority world to political and social backwardness, economic stagnation, and cultural oppressiveness. For the planners and supporters of Bush Administration policy in Iraq, the actions of the country's Sunni minority, and the thousands of foreign"jihadis" who have come to fight the Great Satan"between the two rivers" (as Mu

The Farhud--The Violent Dispossession of Jews and Property in Iraq in 1951

by Edwin Black

Suddenly the phones went dead in Baghdad. The day was March 10, 1951. By the time the dial tone came back, within about 24 hours, some 120,000 middle class and affluent Jews in Iraq, nearly the whole of Iraqi Jewry, would discover they were paupers. Penniless, Iraq’s 2,600-year old Jewish community would then be expelled en masse to Israel. They left behind property currently valued at a billion dollars by some, and many billions by others. Today, as attorneys,

George W. Bush’s Crusade and American Fundamentalism

by William Marina

“God’s blessing is on him [George W. Bush]. It’s the blessing of heaven on the emperor.” —Pat Robertson, evangelist “The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay. While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and s

Teddy’s Corollary After a Century: Perpetual Intervention for Perpetual Peace

by William Marina & David T. Beito

December 6th, 2004, marks the centennial of one of the significant landmark statements in American foreign policy: Theodore Roosevelt’s so-called Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The notion that President George Bush has initiated a new direction in American policy with his proclamation of preemptive strikes should perhaps be viewed from the perspective of T.R.’s pronouncemen

Why Some Are Calling Thomas P.M. Barnett Our Age's George F. Kennan

by Mark Safranski

Americans tend to be a practical people. When faced with a problem we experiment, improvise and muddle through until we succeed or we move on to more fruitful endeavors. De Tocqueville wrote, “The spirit of the Americans is averse to general ideas and does not seek theoretical discoveries.” A truism evidenced even in our greatest politicians – Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt – who during a crisis, broke from tradition but did so without any grand design. As a re

The New Anti-Americanism – A British Perspective

by Mel Ayton

With the impending inauguration of President George W. Bush many pro-American Frenchmen and Englishmen are bracing themselves for yet another round of anti-American sentiments expressed by their countries’ left-wing elites. Out of all the nations that make up the European Union it is Britain and France that harbor the most virulent of critics who believe the United States is, once more, steering a unilateralist path to Armageddon. Although Tony Blair remains a popular Prime Mini

Is Bush's Next Target ... Iran?

by Ivan Eland

Will the newly energized President Bush interpret his narrow election win as public approval for his spaghetti Western-style shoot-'em-up foreign policy? Many neo-conservatives outside the Bush administration have made noise about going after Iran. Could the swaggering sheriff be convinced by these pundits to take on the black-hatted mullahs of Iran? Let’s hope not; attacking Iran would be a bigger folly than invading Iraq. The Iranians only got serious about getting a nuclear

Given Its History, Can We Succeed in Iraq?

by Edwin Black

America cannot succeed in Iraq until we understand the history we ignored and recently repeated. Since the beginning of recorded time, Mesopotamia, that is, the V-shaped land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, has been a realm of uninterrupted violence and conflict. Commerce has been a leading cause. The region’s schoolboy subtitle, “Cradle of Civilization,” hailing back some 7,000 years, is more than misleading. Genuine civilizations clearly emerged throughou

The Air War in Iraq: Why Is It Off the Media's Radar Screen?

by Tom Engelhardt

The human imagination is quicker off the mark than any six-gun, bomb, or JDAM missile. Long before humans made it into airplanes, whole cities were being destroyed from the air -- in an avalanche of popular fiction. By the late 19th century London had gone down in flames more than once and New York soon would follow; genocidal wars from the air were repeatedly imagined and described in which whole nations, whole races, were wiped out. In 1913, over three decades before the first atomic bomb w

Why the Nobel Prize for Peace Went to an Environmentalist--And Should Have

by Irwin Abrams

On December 10 the Nobel Peace Prize for 2004 will be presented in Oslo to Wangari Maathai (pronounced wan-GAH-ree mah-DHEYE), the Kenyan environmentalist, known best for her extensive program of tree planting. Even before this award was announced in October, a question was raised in the press as to whether the prize really mattered, and afterward there were criticisms even in Norway about such a choice when the world is facing political crises in the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, and t

Why Elections in Iraq Are a Lose-Lose Proposition

by Edwin Black

Iraq ’s proposed January elections are a lose-lose proposition. Fifteen Sunni and two leading Kurdish political parties have banded together to ask Iraq’s Interim Government to postpone elections now scheduled for January 30, 2005. They claim the continuing violence and insurgency makes a vote imperiled if not impossible. That reality was driven home just days ago when a grenade was tossed into a school with a note warning school administrators not to allow their building

The Revolt Against the Bush Administration's Nuclear Double Standard

by Lawrence S. Wittner

In late November, when Congress refused to appropriate money to fund so-called "bunker busters" and "mini-nukes," this action represented not only a serious blow to the Bush administration's plan to build new nuclear weapons, but to the administr

The Reason Those Obits on Arafat Rang False

by Gil Troy

The worldwide eulogies lionizing former Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat were predictable, as was the United Nation’s flag flying at half-mast. Still, it was surprising how many simply glossed over Arafat’s methods. Ignoring terrorism when assessing Arafat is like evaluating Robin Hood without mentioning stealing or Adolf Hitler without mentioning anti-Semitism.   Here, then, is an underappreciated but corrosive aspect of Arafat’s legacy. It i

Why Bush Should Wear a Blue and Orange Tie

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Will Bush stand tall for Ukraine’s “orange revolution" Nicholas Kristof asks in his New York Times Saturday column? I hope not. If anything, he should wear a blue and orange tie to express his respect for the democratically mature fashion in which the Ukrainians handled the post-election period along with his support for a unified Ukraine irrespective of the identity of the ultimate wi

Why a Good Outcome Is Doubtful Even If Elections Are Held in Iraq

by Mark LeVine

Since November 2nd I have often heard it said that in an environment where the majority of Americans are divided, cynical and distrustful of their fellow citizens and government, it was natural for them to choose a strong, conservatively religious president with a narrow political vision to lead them. If true, this dynamic does not augur well for the Iraq that will emerge after January 30. Underlying the decision to confirm Iraqi elections for the end of January are two important c

Did President Bush Receive a Mandate?

by Mark Safranski

In the aftermath of the 2004 re-election of President Bush a debate has erupted on whether his margin of victory at the polls over Senator Kerry constituted a " mandate". In terms of American foreign policy, the voters may have determined that the 2004 election constitutes if not a "landslide" for George W. Bush, then a "landmark" where a fundamental shift in American policy in world affairs has been ratified and consolidated. Previous presidential el

Interview with Historical Novelist William Schroder: Before Iraq, There Was the Philippines

by Rudy Rimando

William Schroeder is the author of the historical novel, Cousins of Color. which is about an African-American soldier who served in the Philippines in 1899 in the aftrmath of the Spanish-American War. Though little is known abou

Shooting the Wounded: What Are the Rules Now?

by Stephen A. Allen

Once again, disturbing images are surfacing from the war in Iraq, this  time of a young Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner in Fallujah. The soldier in question has been removed from duty and may face a court martial. U.S. military and Iraqi officials have decried the incident.   This sort of act is nothing new in war. Unarmed, or seemingly unarmed, people have been killed before and will be killed again by soldiers making split-second decisions under almost inconceivabl

Are We to Blame for Afghanistan?

by Chalmers Johnson

Steve Coll ends his important book on Afghanistan -- Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001--by quoting Afghan President Hamid Karzai:"What an unlucky country." Americans might find this a convenient way to ignore what their government did in Afghanistan between 1979 and the present, but luck had nothing to do with it. Brutal, incompe