Iraq’s refugees tell heartbreaking accounts of suffering, displacement, and shattered dreams, but these refugees represent more than mere human interest stories. Collectively, the outpouring of millions of Iraqi refugees into a very small number of neighboring countries poses a dramatic security threat to the Middle East, and there is no sign that threat is going away. In the lead up to the Iraq war, most of the U.S. government discussion about refugees assumed that refugee flows would be sudden, massive and brief. When more than a million Kurds fled Iraq into Turkey and Iran in 1991 to avoid Saddam’s wrath, [...]
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization last week announced that it is contemplating scaling back its highly publicized NATO Response Force, the Alliance’s rapid reaction military force and its catalyst for military transformation. As is often the case for NATO, the real world intruded on its military ambitions. “There is an examination underway” within NATO to see how to sustain the response force, which requires a steady state of 25,000 troops trained and ready to deploy, said spokesman James Appathurai at a press briefing in Brussels. “We could have an NRF that is not always at 25,000” he postulated, “rather than [...]
For approximately 36 hours last month, the U.S. Air Force lost track of half a dozen nuclear weapons. Although Air Force leaders characterize the event as a unique occurrence, the incident will likely encourage opposition to the Bush administration’s Prompt Global Strike plan, which aims give the United States the option of using nuclear and non-nuclear weapons on the same delivery systems. On Aug. 30, the crew of an Air Force B-52H Stratofortress unknowingly carried six nuclear-tipped AGM-129 cruise missiles while flying from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Throughout the three-and-a-half-hour [...]
