When the USA overthrew the Taliban in 2001 and Saddam Hussein in 2003, many hoped that America could repeat its great foreign policy successes of neutralizing Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan following World War II. Overthrowing the former permanently moved extraordinarily grave threats to international stability.
Barack Obama and Gordon Brown were both reluctant warriors, boxed in by their respective military forces. Afghanistan was a war they both inherited, and at first underestimated, defining their position on it more by contrast to Iraq than on its merits. They realised soon enough that it was going badly. Casualties and costs were rising, the progress on development was stalling since 2001 and being overtaken by corruption, and public support at home was ebbing away
Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, chronicles the President’s effort to fashion a policy for the Afghanistan War. It describes the agonizingly slow process composed of high level government reviews, meetings and reports that culminated with President’s decision in late 2009 to add 30,000 more American troops to the conflict this year and begin withdrawals in July 2011.
The threat posed by extreme terrorism to the United Kingdom is both serious and ongoing, specifically since the catastrophic events 9/11 and 7/7. Security and liberty are both essential to modern democracy, but they do not hold equal value. Thus, security should be given greater weight than liberty in order to secure the state and prevent future terrorist attacks.
Glimpses of post-9/11 anti-terrorism machinery are not particularly edifying, whatever one’s views. The real solution to terrorism is more rule of law, not less.
Five years before Hezbollah, ten years before Al Qaeda and Hamas, and 15 years before the Taliban, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was founded in northern Sri Lanka in 1976, beginning life as one of many militias fighting for Tamil independence from the predominantly Sinhalese Sri Lanka
President Obama and other senior US officials make constant reference to America being “a nation at war.” This is politically necessary to say and obviously the case because the US has nearly a hundred thousand troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan and reports combat casualties daily.
To the extent that The Wire has had anything to say about the events of 9/11, which it implicitly comments upon during its five seasons, it is the message of continuity that stands out. Too much has been made about how the world changed on 9/11. And while it would be altogether fraught to claim that nothing has changed, it is also true that the world which existed before 9/11 continues to exist today.
In order to avoid losing ground in a geopolitically pivotal region of the world, the US must be bold. Today, Iran and the increasingly confident Shia of the Middle East are playing a central role in shaping what the region will look like a generation from now. The US must be able to adapt to the shifting sands and not cling rigidly to yesteryear’s policy prescriptions.
The kind of conventional military brinkmanship going on at the common NATO-Russia border is not good news. A phenomenon not seen since the frostiest Cold War periods. If the last East-West confrontation offers a cautionary tale, it is that the situation urgently needs to be de-escalated, before worst-case scenarios become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Before you download your free e-book, please consider donating to support open access publishing.
E-IR is an independent non-profit publisher run by an all volunteer team. Your donations allow us to invest in new open access titles and pay our bandwidth bills to ensure we keep our existing titles free to view. Any amount, in any currency, is appreciated. Many thanks!
Donations are voluntary and not required to download the e-book - your link to download is below.
