Lethality Beyond the Pale In those first minutes, they’ll be stunned. Eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, nerve endings numbed. They’ll just stand there. Soon, you’ll notice that they are holding their arms out at a 45-degree angle. Your eyes will be drawn to their hands and you’ll think you mind is playing tricks. But [...]

Este asunto eminentemente “bushista” de la “línea roja” de Obama, aplicado a Siria, Irán, o ambos, está cayendo un poco en el ridículo. Por ejemplo, el tour de Israel y del “amistoso” CCG (en realidad el Club de la Contrarrevolución del Golfo) del jefe del Pentágono Chuck Hagel la semana pasada. Los contratistas de la defensa [...]

On a plane circling Baghdad in gray dawn light, a little Iraqi girl quietly sang to herself in the next row. “When I start to wonder why I’m making this trip,” Sean Penn murmured to me, “I see that child and I remember what it’s about.”

The taking of US diplomatic personnel hostage by radical Iranian activists and angry crowds in November of 1979, and then the backing for this action of the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was profoundly illegal. I know some of the former hostages, and deeply sympathize with their trauma. Nothing justifies what was done to them.

Ten years ago, Katharine Gun, then a 28-year-old British intelligence officer, saw an e-mailed memo from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that confirmed for her in black and white the already widespread suspicion that the U.S. and U.K. were about to launch war against Iraq on false pretenses.

Al informar sobre el debate final de la campaña presidencial en Estados Unidos, The Wall Street Journal observó que el único país más mencionado (que Israel) fue Irán, al cual la mayoría de naciones de Medio Oriente ven como la mayor amenaza a la seguridad de la región. Los dos candidatos estuvieron de acuerdo en que [...]

Reporting on the final U.S. presidential campaign debate, on foreign policy, The Wall Street Journal observed that “the only country mentioned more (than Israel) was Iran, which is seen by most nations in the Middle East as the gravest security threat to the region.” The two candidates agreed that a nuclear Iran is the gravest threat [...]

Megatrends, Game-Changers, Black Swans, Tectonic Shifts, and a World Not That Different From 2012 Think of it as a simple formula: if you’ve been hired (and paid handsomely) to protect what is, you’re going to be congenitally ill-equipped to imagine what might be.  And yet the urge not just to know the contours of the [...]

Noam Chomsky on U.S.-Fueled Dangers, from Climate Change to Nuclear Weapons In the week when President Obama and Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney debated issues of foreign policy and the economy, we turn to world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author and MIT professor, Noam Chomsky. In a recent speech, Chomsky examined topics largely ignored or glossed over [...]

Ahora que el espectáculo cuatrienal de la elección presidencial está alcanzando la cúspide, es útil preguntar cómo las campañas políticas están abordando los temas más cruciales que enfrentamos. La respuesta es sencilla: mal, o para nada. En tal caso, surgen algunas preguntas importantes: ¿por qué, y qué podemos hacer al respecto? Estos son dos temas [...]