News Abroad

Britain's Continuing Abdication of Responsibility for the Palestinian Crisis

by Ilan Pappe

The continued British silence on the Palestine question is stunning, if we remember that it was Tony Blair who claimed that the war on Iraq was meant to help and solve the Palestine problem. It is in fact Blair's policies that have disabled the European Union from taking a bolder and more constructive role in the face of the destructive pro-Israeli American policies. The last British gesture was back in August 2003 when Sharon was welcomed as a peace statesmen, while in t

Military: Is the Pentagon Preparing for the Last War?

by Michael P. Noonan and John Hillen

The 9/11 attacks reawakened the U.S. to the fact that the world is a hazardous place deserving renewed vigilance and a proactive foreign policy. State or non-state, future enemies will be empowered by the same global trends that give terrorists access to fluid financing, decisive information, freedom of movement, and weapons of mass destruction. Future foes -- particularly non-state enemies -- will change the nature of warfare so as to strip the U.S. of its overwhe

How Liberal Democracies Can Shield Themselves from Terrorism

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

It would be funny, if it were not so tragic. But Moslem radicals and their supporters insist that they have the right to enter societies they consider their mortal enemies, benefit from the liberties they seek to undermine and, then, proceed to destroy them from within. Lenin quipped that the capitalists will sell their enemies the rope with which to hang themselves. Current Jihadists dream of not only buying the rope from the Western countries they seek to destroy but of making the

In Nearly All of Our Wars We've Made Serious Mistakes

by Thomas Fleming

The current cacophony over President Bush's supposed miscalculation about the difficulty of pacifying Iraq is badly in need of some historical perspective. The commentators and candidates can't seem to recall any war before Vietnam. If we look a little farther back -- and even a lot farther back -- we will find that many American leaders, including the founding fathers, went to war on assumptions that soon proved painfully wrong. In 1776, the Americans revol

The End of the Republic?

by Chalmers Johnson

The collapse of the Roman republic in 27 BC has significance today for the United States, which took many of its key political principles from its ancient predecessor. Separation of powers, checks and balances, government in accordance with constitutional law, a toleration of slavery, fixed terms in office, all these ideas were influenced by Roman precedents. John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams often read the great Roman political philosopher Cicero and spoke of him as an inspiration to the

The Oslo Mistake

by Daniel Pipes

Ten years later, it is embarrassing to recall the elation and soaring expectations. President Bill Clinton lauded it as a "great occasion of history." Secretary of State Warren Christopher ruminated on how "the impossible is within our reach." Yasser Arafat called it an "historic event, inaugurating a new epoch." Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of Israel discerned in it "the outline of peace in the Middle East."The press hyped it,

Why Algeria Should Be on the Minds of the Pentagon Generals

by Sheila K. Johnson

Challenged by terrorist tactics and guerrilla warfare in Iraq, the Pentagon recently held a screening of"The Battle of Algiers," the film that in the late 1960's was required viewing and something of a teaching tool for radicalized Americans and revolutionary wannabes opposing the Vietnam War.--NYT, September 7, 2003 I hadn't looked at The Battle of Algiers, th

A Sign of Progress in the Middle East Would Be the Opening of a Casino in Jericho

by William Thompson and Asher Friedberg

Casino gambling can thrive only if there are ambient conditions of peace in society. The best news suggesting that the latest "roadmap" for peace between Israel and the Palestine Authority was a plan for reopening the Casino Oasis just outside of Jericho at the border point dividing lands of the two jurisdictions. This essay takes a look at the once and future casino of Jericho.Pockets of Sovereignty and GamblingUnusual pockets of sovereignty a

Now Anti-Semites Are Citing Harry Truman

by Robert Rabil

A newly discovered Truman diary, dated 1947, was published recently. The diary revealed scorn for "cruel Jews." He wrote "The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish," "they care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment." He continued: "Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin

Our Misguided Neglect of the UN

by Stephen Schlesinger

"Four times in the modern age," English historian John Keegan has written, "men have sat down to reorder the world -- at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 after the Thirty Years War, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, in Paris in 1919 after World War I and in San Francisco in 1945 after World War II." Such is the march of human history that all of these events -- except for the most recent one -- collapsed in disagreements

What We're Grappling with in Iraq Is Woodrow Wilson's Legacy

by Thomas Fleming

To understand what we are doing in Iraq, we have to go back to a war that is almost a hundred years old. In its day it was called The Great War. Now we call it World War I. No matter what we call it, this war forever changed America's relations with the rest of the world. President George W. Bush has been castigated by some critics for failing to work with the United Nations in the war with Iraq. World War I was the first act of the ongoing drama of the Unit

Iraq: A Way Out

by Rick Shenkman

Do you remember the stories you read as a child about people whose lives were changed, usually for the worse, because of a misplaced word or a transposed comma? I was reminded of these stories recently when reading about Iraq. Iraq is collapsing because we have misplaced a word. The word is federation.In the year and half since the Bush administration first began championing regime change in Iraq the one assumption everybody made was that whatever came after Saddam it h

Condi Rice Is Wrong About Germany's Werewolves, But Right About Iraq

by Jeffrey Herf

Toward the end of this grim summer in Iraq, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice compared the attacks on American and British soldiers there to the violence supposedly carried out by diehard Nazi fanatics known as "Werewolves" after 1945. Dr. Rice rightly noted that the period of 1945 to 1947 was a terribly difficult one. Four of the sixty million people killed in the Second World War around the globe were Germans. The German economy had collapsed. Millio

Why Are U.S. Policymakers So Fickle When It Comes to China?

by Jianwei Wang

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States-from policymakers to the public-has engaged itself in the seemingly endless debate about whether China is its friend or foe. Immediately after the Tiananmen incident and the demise of the Soviet Union, people debated whether this struggling communist regime would soon collapse and therefore was still worthy of friendship from the United States. After China achieved a remarkable economic "soft landing" and subsequent robust econom

Fixing Germany Wasn't Easy Either

by Leslie S. Lebl

A GERMAN FRIEND born in 1941 once recounted that he had been so hungry as a small child that, left unsupervised in the pantry, he ate an entire jar of mustard. The conversation made a strong impression on me, in part because of his bitterness toward the occupying powers that had presided over such conditions. Certainly, it did not match my view of German reconstruction as fast, easy, and successful from the start. Yet that view seems to be the model against which our performance in I

Why Are There So Many Palestinian Refugees?

by Daniel Pipes

Here's a puzzle: How do Palestinian refugees differ from the other 135 million 20th-century refugees? Answer: In every other instance, the pain of dispossession, statelessness, and poverty has diminished over time. Refugees eventually either resettled, returned home or died. Their children - whether living in South Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey, Germany or the United States - then shed the refugee status and joined the mainstream.Not so the Palestinians. F

Did You Know that the Radicals of the Middle East Used to Be Christians?

by Philip Jenkins

Though Americans may be a little fuzzy about identifying their deadliest enemies in the Middle East, they have few doubts that the chief demon-figures are solidly Muslim. Thirty or so years ago, Palestinian Arab terrorists and hijackers clearly represented the deadliest threat to the West, only to be replaced in the 1980s by Shi'ite groups like Hizbullah, and more recently by the still deadlier al-Qaeda. Behind these frightening names lurk the so-called bandit-states, like

What's China Thinking?

by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

What is China thinking? It's a question worth asking because the Chinese government has already defied conventional wisdom not just once but twice this year. First, in the spring, it took a surprisingly hard line toward the nuclear posturing by Pyongyang that has placed North Korea at the center of a diplomatic storm. Now it's taking a surprisingly soft line toward massive protests in Hong Kong that have directly challenged Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies

Hiroshima, 2003

by Tadatoshi Akiba

This year again, summer's heat reminds us of the blazing hell fire that swept over this very spot fifty-eight years ago. The world without nuclear weapons and beyond war that our hibakusha have sought for so long appears to be slipping deeper into a thick cover of dark clouds that they fear at any minute could become mushroom clouds spilling black rain. The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the central international agreement guiding the elimination of nuclear weapons, is on the ve

Why the Easy Generalizations About the Causes of Terrorism Are Wrong

by Walter Laqueur

Following is an excerpt from Mr. Laqueur's newest book, No End to War. To read the full chapter from which this excerpt is drawn click here . The causes of terrorism have been a source of bewilderment and misconceptions for a long time. It was widely believed that terrorism w