Global Archive

The House Committee on Foreign Affairs held a hearing the week before last on the funding of UN peacekeeping missions which slipped under the radar but deserves more attention. Chairman Bill Delahunt, in his opening statement (.pdf), made the good point that the billing formula needs to be updated to better reflect current economic realities: the U.S. is currently billed 25% of U.N. peacekeeping costs, compared to 3% for China and 1% for Gazprom Russia. Be that as it may, Delahunt also pointed out that U.N. peacekeeping missions address some vital American national security interests at one-eighth of the cost […]

Editor’s Note: Today, April 9, is the five-year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Five years ago, about 30 kilometers West of Baghdad, just past the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison, I was part of a grisly find that left no doubt in my mind about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq. There, nearly 1,000 political prisoners were buried in secret graves at the al-Qarah cemetery. All had died in custody. Ten to 15 corpses at a time were buried by Mohammad Moshan Mohammad, the gravedigger who told me how the dead had arrived during the three years before […]

KOSOVO LEADER CLEARED OF WAR CRIMES CHARGES — A United Nations war crimes tribunal at the Hague acquitted former Kosovo guerilla commander and prime minister Ramush Haradinaj April 3 on charges of rape, murder and torture. The charges stemmed from the 1998 actions of Kosovo Liberation Army troops under his command against Kosovo Serbian civilians. Harandinaj, who resigned in 2005 as prime minister to voluntarily turn himself over to the court, was the most senior ethnic Albanian figure to stand trial for actions during the KLA’s battle against Serbian forces in 1998-1999. Haradinaj’s uncle, Lahi, was found guilty of mistreating […]

According to Nikolas Gvosdev, the NATO summit was far from a failure for President Bush, who walked away with an alliance endorsement of his potentially divisive missile defense plans, as well as 700 French troops for Afghanistan. (For any French language readers, Jean-Dominique Merchet of Secret Défense explains that when you factor in previous French training commitments and their rotating command of the OHQ in Kaboul, that will actually come to more than a thousand new French boots on the ground.) Gvosdev thinks that by fobbing the defeat of Ukraine and Georgia’s MAP’s on Germany, France and “Old Europe”, Bush […]

I just finished reading Spencer Ackerman’s American Prospect piece, The Obama Doctrine, and I have to admit that while I like Obama’s foreign policy approach, and I like Ackerman’s piece, the article reflects a certain confusion that seems prevalent in the way we parse the complicated causal matrix that links poverty, security and political repression to terrorism. Ackerman follows up a passage summarizing the various liberal critiques of President Bush’s democracy promotion agenda with this: What’s typically neglected in these arguments is the simple insight that democracy does not fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of […]

From a House Foreign Affairs Committee press release this afternoon: . . . the House today voted overwhelmingly to expand the landmark U.S. effort to combat HIV/AIDS worldwide that, during the past five years, has saved millions of lives. . . . The 2003 law provided the U.S. global health effort $15 billion over five years; the legislation passed by the House today authorizes $50 billion for the next five years. The President had called for only a $30 billion reauthorization, and the White House renewed that call just after the February committee vote; nevertheless, yesterday the Administration issued a […]

WorldPublicOpinion.org reports that a BBC World Service poll has found an international uptick in positive attitudes about the United States: After years of becoming progressively more negative, public views of the United States have begun to improve, according to a BBC World Service Poll across 34 countries. While views of US influence in the world are still predominantly negative, they have improved in 11 of the 23 countries the BBC polled a year ago, while worsening in just three countries. The average percentage saying that the US is having a positive influence has increased from 31 per cent a year […]

A few quick links from our afternoon blog reading: –Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic gives McCain the benefit of the doubt on his “100 years” comment. –Russia Blog says McCain’s view of Russia is doublethink. –The Washington Realist highlights conservative criticisms of a League of Democracies. –EURSOC says Carlamania continues in Britain in the wake of Sarko’s trip. –The FDD blog highlights a WSJ opinion piece diagnosing Bush’s real intelligence failure. –Daniel Drezner (guest-blogging for Megan McArdle) predicts the long-term Zimbabwe news cycle. –James Gordon Meek at the Counterterrorism Blog looks at CIA Chief Hayden’s seeming confirmation of reports that […]

Back in February, the Foreign Policy Association’s Curt Ricci wondered whether Afghanistan would turn out to be the giant-slayer that brought down both the Warsaw Pact and NATO in the space of a generation. At the time, Robert Gates was busy browbeating the alliance to poney up more troops for the Afghanistan mission: NATO is a collective security agreement, a military alliance. The members have signed up with certain obligations in this regard. But if it were to become the case that some allies are not prepared to fulfill their military obligations, while others continue to do so, I think […]