Global Archive

France 24 just posted last Friday’s panel discussion program, The World This Week, which I took part in along with John Vinocur from the IHT, Pierre Rousselin from Le Figaro and Gerry Feehily from Presseurop.eu. . Part one is here, part two is here. I developed the thought behind the first point I made, on Tony Blair’s justification for the Iraq War, in a blog post here. As I mention in the post, the idea occurred to me pretty spontaneously, and I’m not sure I articulated it very clearly on the program. Besides that, we discussed the London conference on […]

Whether or not he’s actually dead, Hakimullah Mehsud illustrates one of the dangers of a CT strategy based on organizational decapitation — namely, that the No. 2 guy waiting in the wings might actually prove to be more dangerous than the guy whose charred boots he filled. A similar phenomenon has been noticeable among the Basque ETA terrorist group, which has replenished its ranks with what appears to be an even more militant younger generation. (Of course, Americans need only look to their own very recent past for another useful illustration.) I have admittedly been among those who have made […]

Great NY Times piece on the growing Guatemalan immigrant population in Brooklyn. The story itself is just an update of a very familiar one, but it shows the enduring appeal — as well as the brutal reality — of the American Dream. Every time I see an image of a U.S. Army platoon outpost in Afghanistan, I shudder at the thought of what we’re asking young Americans to live through over there. I had a similar, if not identical, reaction upon reading of a 39-year-old day laborer who hasn’t seen his family in 14 years. It’s also true that this […]

The Indian national security journal, Pragati, put together a great infographic of U.N. peacekeeping operations around the world. Definitely worth a glance, especially since that’s all it takes to absorb the information.

One of the subjects of the France 24 week-in-review panel discussion program I took part in on Friday — link to follow, hopefully, because it was a great group — was Tony Blair’s appearance before the U.K.’s Iraq War inquiry commission. Blair, it seems, suggested that among the reasons he had supported the invasion of Iraq was because he didn’t want the U.S. to be “alone.” This reflected, as one of the other panelists put it, how the Iraq War was a war in search of a cause, to which I responded that it seems to me that Blair had […]