News Abroad

School Lunches for Kids Around the World: Hey, Why Not?

by William Lambers

In his first major foreign policy address in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called for "a declared total war.. upon the brute forces of poverty and need." Eisenhower stated, "The peace we seek…can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and by timber and by rice." Today, the idea of an all-out war on global poverty needs to be an integral part of U.S. policy in our effort to seek peace in the 21st century.

A Peace Plan That May Be Worse Than War

by Jonathan Goldstein

In preparation for hosting an upcoming summit of Arab heads of state, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah has recirculated his five-year-old Middle East peace plan. The Prince first floated this proposal to President George W. Bush in April 2002. Theoretically, it has never been taken off the table. The proposal is commendable for its novelty. For the first time, the Saudis have persuaded 21 other Arab states to agree to conditions under which all would recognize the State of Israel.

The Forgotten Alliance of African Nationalists and Western Pacifists

by Lawrence S. Wittner

This year, the West African nation of Ghana is celebrating fifty years of independence, based on the termination of British rule of the Gold Coast (as Ghana was called in the colonial era) in 1957.The independence ceremonies of March 6, 1957 had great symbolic significance.  Ghana was the first country to throw off colonial rule in Black Africa.  In addition, its first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, was a fiery African nationalist who had led a daring and unremitting campaign

In Response to Timothy Furnish's "Anti-Semitism in Islam: Israel Didn't Start the Fire"

by David H Slavin

HNN is a valuable resource and provocative opinion pieces that it publishes are useful in classes and discussion groups I teach or facilitate. However, by repeatedly running articles by someone as tendentious as Timothy Furnish, HNN legitimates his position and at the same time advertises his book. This is unfair. The time and effort required to refute his observations precludes a response from anyone who is knowledgeable enough to counter his seemingly well-documen

Congress v. the President in Iraq and Vietnam

by Peter N. Kirstein

The midterm congressional elections in November 2006, with the return of a Democratic majority to both houses of Congress (although razor thin in the Senate), have been widely interpreted as an antiwar referendum on the Iraq conflict. A majority of Americans now oppose the Iraq War and believe it was a mistake. On January 10, 2007, President George W. Bush announced there would be an escalation of the conflict with the deployment of 21,500 additional military personnel to ravaged Baghdad and to

What Iraqis Could Learn from France's Wars of Religion

by Liam M. Brockey

In recent months, public figures and scholars including Salman Rushdie and Tariq Ramadan have raised the question of whether Islam needs a Reformation, one akin to the great changes in Europe that began in the sixteenth century. The Reformation, for them, clearly evokes the kindling of intellectual fires that would eventually grow into the Enlightenment. Yet like the prescription for democracy, the call for a Reformation is a very tall order. After all, it was as much an era of religious refo

Mr. Bush Needs to Sell this War ... to the Highest Bidder!

by Ken Shear

What with the Iraq study group urging transition of the US role in Iraq, and Democrats ready to end the war, and neo-cons hot to expand the war to Iran, the US is surely not short on options. Yet the President seems stuck. He recognizes that people are against the war for pretty good reasons. But he’s not the kind of President to walk away from a fight. No he’s never been a soldier himself, but he has been a cheerleader, and a cheerleader does not walk off the field just becau

Is Israel Falling Apart?

by Dror Wahrman

Foreign observers of Israel tend to focus so intently on the dangers the country faces from its Arab neighbours that they have largely missed an astonishing story that has been accelerating over the past few months: that of the Jewish state’s possible move toward internal collapse. If you consider this an exaggeration, just take note of what the past couple of weeks have brought about. A few days ago the chief of the Israeli police resigned after an investigation that found several of Isra

The Moral Dilemma of the 21st Century

by Paul Conkin

In writing my most recent book, The State of the Earth: Environmental Challenges on the Road to 2100 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), I kept returning over and over again to a profound moral dilemma. It was this dilemma that, in part, inspired me to write the book, a book in which I used the history of the past century to probe the future. I did not resolve the dilemma, but in this brief essay I want to suggest its dimensions.

Neville Chamberlain's Real Mistake--And Bush's

by Jeff Shear

What's new about the old tale of politicians abusing intelligence? Not a lot, as the "Scooter" Libby trial demonstrates. Whether the administration saw what it wanted to see in Ambassador Joseph Wilson's report from Nigeria about the non-sale of yellow cake uranium to Iraq, or the administration manufactured what it wanted the nation to believe about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the Bush White House’s capacity for magical thinking (to borrow a phrase from auth

The History of the 1994 Agreed Framework

by Daniel Poneman

Note: This article was first published in 2006.The North Korean nuclear program remained small until the mid-1980s, when a five megawatt (MW) "research reactor" -- a natural uranium-fueled, gas-graphite moderated design ideally suited to produce weapons plutonium -- entered into operation at Yongbyon. In 1985 North Korea acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, forswearing nuclear weapons and committing to conclude a safeguards agreement with the International Atomi

An Old-Fashioned Quarantine of North Korea Using Battleships? Well, Maybe Yes.

by D.M. Giangreco

Note: This article was written before the latest breakthrough in the six-party talks. North Korea's apparent detonation of a nuclear device in October, and threats to test fire nuclear missiles present the United States with no useful military option, but may have finally sent enough of a chill down Chinese spines that we may be able to do something that the US Navy is quite good at -- establish an maintain an effective quarantine of the Pyongyang regime. China wants s

A Clash of Civilizations or Just a Phase in Democratic Development?

by Josiah C. Russell and Elbert W. Russell

The catastrophic events in Iraq demonstrate the effect of political decisions that are based on a wrong reading of history. President Bush and even much of the United States accepted the concept that dictatorships are an “evil” form of government that must be eliminated. Had the present government held an alternative concept of political history the actions of the United States might have been less disastrous. Such an alternative was held by my father, the historian J.C.

Send More Troops to Baghdad?

by Anthony James Joes

A major justification for President Bush’s plan to send 20,000 additional troops to Iraq is that they will restore a semblance of peace to turbulent Baghdad.  They will achieve this aim not by surrounding the city (which is far too big) but by pacifying selected areas of it one by one. This “clear-and-hold” approach – expelling guerrillas and establishing civilian security in one delimited area and then repeating the process in another -- has been the method of di

Three lessons of World War II for Today’s Generation

by Michael Bess

World War II was profoundly different from the conflict the United States currently finds itself waging in Iraq, but that titanic struggle of the mid-twentieth century does offer three valuable lessons for the leaders and citizens of today.  Here is how I would sum them up:1. Acknowledge messy complexity.

Anti-Semitism in Islam: Israel Didn’t Start the Fire

by Timothy R. Furnish

Conventional wisdom among many American citizens, as well as numerous journalists, politicians and media anchors, has it that anti-Semitism1 in the Islamic world constitutes a not unreasonable reaction to the late 19th c. Zionist movement which led to the creation of the state of Israel right after World War II. In this view, were Israel to totally withdraw from the West Bank (and other disputed Arab territories), as well as enact th

What is Bush and Cheney's Game vis-à-vis Iran?

by Jeffrey Kimball

In a January 2005 article in the New Yorker based on unnamed sources inside the Bush administration, Seymour Hersh argued that an ideologically rigid, militaristic, messianic, neocon clique—which included Bush and Cheney—was serious about using military force against Iran over the issue of its nuclear program. When reporters asked President Bush about such claims, his refrain was deliberately ambiguous: “This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack I

Bush the Empire Slayer

by Bernard Chazelle

If you fancy losing an argument, try shooting down my contention that Mikhail Gorbachev is the leading historical figure of our time. Not one to miss a shooting opportunity, Dick Cheney tried. To my surprise, he won.Westerners fondly remember Gorbachev for finishing off an ailing Soviet empire left bleeding from its Afghan travails. Defusing half a century of nuclear tension can leave a mark on impressionable minds. On Cheney's—not so much. The former Defense Secretary had a tend

Out of Iraq Now

by William R. Polk

Address to the Progressive Caucus and the Out of Iraq Caucus of the U.S House of Representatives on Friday, January 12, 2007. Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Congresswoman Maxine Waters, I address you particularly as chairwomen of the Progressive Caucus and the Out of Iraq Caucus. It gives me particular pleasure both as an American and as a historian to do so because the curious word “caucus” is deeply rooted in the American experience. One of the

We Tried to Use Force to Reach a Settlement in Nicaragua, too

by John R. Bawden

In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. and NATO forces have few good options. A rapid military withdrawal from either country is likely to result in civil violence. Yet increasing the number of foreign troops will not necessarily speed political agreement among political factions in Iraq or Afghanistan. This dilemma has a historical parallel in the 1920s, when U.S. Marines were sent to Nicaragua under the banner of restoring order and building institutions to foster democracy. The