News & Comment

Since the GOP platform has been released, there has been lots of parsing of the various positions released, and with tonight’s speeches there should be a focus on the foreign policy and national security section. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post described the national security platform has high on criticism of President Obama but light on policy recommendations to address these challenges. Here are five national security issues for which the platform attempts to offer policy proposals, but falls flat. read more »

George W. Bush may be completely absent at the Republican National Convention, but at a theater just beyond the security perimeter, it was as if he was still in office today as Condoleezza Rice and former Bush chief of staff Joshua Bolten praised his legacy. The lineup of the forum, meant to “give you a sense of where Republicans stand on issues of foreign aid and national security,” as the president of the National Republican Institute said in his opening remarks, suggest just how little Republican foreign policy has changed since 2001, despite the intervention of two unpopular and disastrous wars that have tarnished the neoconservative ideals that defined the Bush era. read more »

There is nothing Republicans would rather the American people forget more than George W. Bush, who doesn’t even have a bit-part at the GOP convention opening in Tampa.  But W’s ghost may be there, anyway. The National Weather Service says tropical storm Isaac is now heading for New Orleans, and Isaac is projected to become a Category 1 hurricane by the time it makes landfall  late Monday or early Tuesday. The GOP was intent on not even bringing up Bush’s name at the GOP convention, because the former president might also remind Americans how little the Republicans care about average Americans, like those caught in Hurricane Katrina, and how much they care about top corporate and Wall Street executives, like those being entertained in Tampa. But Hurricane Isaac seems likely to remind Americans anyway. read more »

The author is the Director of Public Policy for POGO (Project On Government Oversight) read more »

You undoubtedly know the phrase: the best laid plans of mice and men.  It couldn’t be more apt when it comes to the American project in Afghanistan.  Washington’s plans have indeed been carefully drawn up.  By the end of 2014, U.S. “combat troops” are to be withdrawn, but left behind on the giant bases the Pentagon has built will be thousands of U.S. trainers and advisers, as well as special operations forces to go after al-Qaeda remnants (and other “militants”), and undoubtedly the air power to back them all up. Thanks to a 10-year Strategic Partnership Agreement, there they are to remain until 2020 or beyond. In other words, the American “withdrawal” regularly mentioned in the media doesn’t really mean “withdrawal.”  On paper at least, for years to come the U.S. will partially occupy a country that has a history of loathing foreigners who won’t leave (and making them pay for it). read more »

Does Rep. Paul Ryan believe that voting for war constitutes foreign policy experience? If so, it is a kind of experience that reflects very poorly on him. Even he must realize that the underlying premise of the war, Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, quickly proved to be nothing more than a Bush administration hoax, along with the secondary claim that Saddam’s regime had some connection with the 9/11 attacks. After casting his party-line vote for a ruinous war because he accepted a faked argument, Ryan never spoke up against its continuation. He ratified every troop escalation and every supplemental appropriation. Unlike the American people, who turned decisively against the war years ago, and have condemned it by large majorities as a waste of blood and treasure, he apparently still believes it was a swell idea. read more »

In 2011, after nearly nine years of war and occupation, U.S. troops finally left Iraq. In their place, Big Oil is now present in force and the country’s oil output, crippled for decades, is growing again. Iraq recently reclaimed the No. 2 position in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), overtaking oil-sanctioned Iran. Now, there’s talk of a new world petroleum glut. So is this finally mission accomplished? Well, not exactly. In fact, any oil company victory in Iraq is likely to prove as temporary as George W. Bush’s triumph in 2003. The main reason is yet another of those stories the mainstream media didn’t quite find room for: the role of Iraqi civil society. But before telling that story, let’s look at what’s happening to Iraqi oil today, and how we got from the “no blood for oil” global protests of 2003 to the present moment. read more »

As I gazed at the faces of the more than 2,000 American service members killed since the war in Afghanistan began almost 11 years ago, I found myself thinking of lines of Kipling: "If any question why we died; Tell them, because our fathers lied. The untruths have been almost too numerous to chronicle, beginning with the great untruth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that justified the war in Iraq (where more than 4,480 U.S. service members died); and sliding into the smaller, no less lethal untruths about how Pakistan was an ally in the Afghan struggle, and global terrorism beatable on the battle field, and nation-building feasible in Afghanistan, and sacrifice in the cause reasonable when half of the United States was off at the mall shopping, and victory always — always — within reach. read more »

Should the enormous US military budget—which is more than double the combined levels of military spending by China, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and Germany—be cut? This question is finally on the table, thanks to the winding down of combat activities in Iraq and Afghanistan and to Washington’s obsession with tamping down the federal deficits that have arisen from the Great Recession. Members of today’s military-industrial complex — the constellation of forces, including Democratic and Republican politicians, weapons manufacturers, lobbyists and the Pentagon leadership, whose influence President Eisenhower warned against in 1961 — claim that significant reductions in the military budget would decimate U.S. defenses and inflict major damage to the economy. In fact, these claims are demonstrably false. read more »

Can we finally say the thing we have not said so far? Last week, a white supremacist shot up a Sikh temple near Milwaukee, killing six people and wounding three. It is considered likely that the shooter mistook the Sikhs, whose men wear beards and turbans, for Muslims. The massacre came a few weeks after a characteristically baseless charge by Michele Bachmann and several other conservative legislators that a Muslim aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has ties to Islamic extremism. The juxtaposition of those two events is emphatically not meant to suggest Bachmann somehow “caused” the Wisconsin rampage. No, the point is that we are looking for terror in all the wrong places. Or, perhaps more accurately, that we are not looking for it in all the right places.n the almost 20 years since the first attack by Muslim extremists on the World Trade Center, the following things have happened. read more »