Part of the path that America must take to regain leverage in global affairs is addressing the moral lapses that occurred during the last administration — ranging from domestic spying authority to the torture and abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo.
What follows is a powerful snapshot of the moral and political dilemma progressives face today. President Obama and his team bailed out Wall Street, richly depicted in Arnaud de Borchgrave‘s commentary “Bonus Pool Party” below.
Iraq government authorities released word a few hours ago that General Ali Hassan al-Majeed, aka “Chemical Ali” and Saddam Hussein’s cousin, had been executed over the weekend. Ali had received four death sentences from Iraq’s courts.
(Alongside U.S. Army officers, a Civilian Response Corps member from the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction & Stabilization, center, participates in discussions with Pashtun tribal leaders in Khost Province, Afghanistan.
While neither the European Union nor Turkey lived up to its end of the EU-accession-process bargain last year, in my view Europe deserves more of the blame for the processes’ steady downward trajectory.
I am in Chestertown, Maryland this morning enjoying a bit of a break from DC — planning a retreat to discuss alternative US policy options in Afghanistan. Chestertown is an old colonial American town with great character and characters.
This is a guest note by Constanze Stelzenmüller, a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin and former defense and international security editor at the German weekly, Die Zeit
Last week I attended an in-house foreign policy discussion with New America Foundation Schwartz Senior Fellow Peter Beinart, who provided a tour of 20th century American foreign policy and introduced me to Walter Lippmann’s concept of “solvency.
On the book jacket/inside flap of Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, Nobel Laureate (too) and New York Times opinion leader Paul Krugman calls Stiglitz an “insanely brilliant economist”.
(Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy) GlobalPost‘s John Aloysius Farrell has a fascinating survey up of perspectives on Obama’s year in foreign policy. Read the entire piece, but I’ve put some of the zinger quotes below — including my own.
