Obama’s “Smart Power” Foreign Policy Not Smart at All
By John Feffer
via Tom Dispatch
Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the last four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on “smart power” — a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all [...]
By Jim Lobe and Gareth Porter
via IPS News
President Barack Obama’s explicit warning that he will not accept a unilateral Israeli attack against Iran may force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step back from his ostensible threat of war.
Netanyahu had hoped that the Obama administration could be put under domestic [...]
Total Tops Iraq at That War’s Height
via Lobe Log
By Nick Turse
via Tom Dispatch
Afghanistan may turn out to be one of the great misbegotten “stimulus packages” of the modern era, a construction boom in the middle of nowhere with materials largely shipped in at enormous expense to no [...]
via Lobe Log
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s trip to the Middle East last week included reassuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in person, that the U.S. was committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — the U.S.’s “red line” on Iran. Panetta reiterated the U.S.’s position, essentially point by point, at [...]
via Think Progress
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and former Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan have both made waves over the past months with statements asserting that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities could only delay, not destroy, the Islamic Republic’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Speaking in Tel Aviv last week, Michèle [...]
How the Tiny Kingdom of Bahrain Strong-Armed the President of the United States
By Nick Turse
Reprinted with the permission of TomDispatch.com.
The men walking down the street looked ordinary enough. Ordinary, at least, for these days of tumult and protest in the Middle East. They wore sneakers and jeans and long-sleeved [...]
News and views relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for November 18, 2010.
The Wall Street Journal: Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), writes that Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), due to its identity as the defender of “Islamic Civilization,” may have already signaled a [...]
The Washington Times story on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s talk on Tuesday is missing a little something. Specifically, the Times omits any mention of his assessment of the unsavory outcomes of a U.S. military attack on Iran.
Here’s the Times report, by Ben Birnbaum (my emphasis throughout), minus the article’s last two [...]
To briefly follow up on Matt Duss’s post about how Joe Lieberman’s hawkish take on Iran is at odds with most of the thought coming out of the Pentagon (which we covered already), the National Security Network (NSN) has lined up and linked to several statements by Pentagon figures — both in uniform [...]
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News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for November 27-29, 2010:
The Wall Street Journal: Harvard professor and Project for the New American Century signatory Stephen Peter Rosen writes that while the United States promotes the elimination of nuclear weapons, Iran and North Korea have made the acquisition of nuclear weapons their high priority. [...]